The gothic supernatural horror is a low-prestige genre and a risky platform to use for a contentious political issue like gun control. It takes a brave filmmaker to imply moral culpability for anyone who makes instruments of death: that is the quicksand on which the film Winchester (2018) stands or falls.

To understand the message of this unremarkable but well executed 19th century horror story, viewers need to be aware that the Winchester Repeating Arms Company was and still is one of the world’s biggest arms manufacturers. It helps also to understand the impact of a rapid-fire lever-action weapon when pitted against older single-shot firearms. It’s the same as the difference between the modern AR-15 assault rifles used in mass shootings and a regular hunting rifle. When it first appeared, the Winchester repeater was described as that “damned Yankee rifle they load on Sunday and shoot all week”. It led to carnage in the Civil War, and like the AR-15, was the most lethal killing machine of its time.

Heiress to the company, Sarah Winchester (Helen Mirren) is a deeply troubled soul. She believes her massive sprawling mansion is haunted and she is cursed by the ghost of every person killed by a Winchester firearm. She obsessively adds a new room in the mansion for each identified ghost, while the Winchester Company board of directors wants her certified insane to gain her 51% controlling stake. The company hires Eric Price (Jason Clarke) to fabricate a report on her mental state, knowing he is a doctor with a drug problem and heavily in debt. As Price spends time at the mansion he discovers more than he expected.

For a horror story, there is little narrative originality here and the standard spook clichés are in ample supply. The set design is based on a richly ornate reproduction of what is today called the Winchester Mystery House, a popular tourist attraction in San Jose, California. British Shakespearean actress Helen Mirren is an odd choice for an American heiress, but her imperious performance is impeccable for a recluse burdened by grief, guilt, and the supernatural. Jason Clarke is well cast as a fallen medico struggling to recover from the tragic loss of his family. All the right ingredients are present and accounted for in what is solid B-grade shlock.

What is there to commend this film? There is a dawning moment of recognition in the film’s early chapter when the parallel with today’s gun control debate becomes apparent. That is not to say it is obvious, and many viewers will read it as a horror story, pure and simple. The filmmaker does not sermonise nor overtly point fingers, but the notion that there is or should be moral accountability on every weapon maker for every death brought about by their work will be confronting for many. If that is so, this ordinary horror rises beyond its station.

A film does not need a message to be meaningful, but it can feel lightweight without one. Even a big-name star and a brisk plotline provides little weight in a story about illicit money and a gambling queen’s efforts to keep ahead of the law. That, in essence, is the plotline of Molly’s Game (2017), a fast-moving tale that struggles to say anything of value.

Based on real events and published in her 2014 memoir, Molly Bloom (Jessica Chastain) was a world-class skier whose Olympic aspirations were shattered through injury. An overbearing father and over-achieving brothers means that failure is not an option, so Molly finds her way into the company of a high-stakes gambling den operator. She becomes the den manager and glamour bait for high-profile and high-wealth players. The intricacies of poker playing become interwoven with the narrative, and we see in detail gaming rules and techniques that few will have heard of. Molly is super-bright and learns quickly, making enough money to set up her own luxury-class den in opposition. Her success and notoriety draw the FBI and the Russian mafia into her orbit, and she faces prison after publishing a tell-all book. With the help of top lawyer Charlie Jeffrey (Idris Elba) she fights to restore her seized assets.

If the film was fictional, you could read it as a high-stakes thriller, a feminist tale, or a hustler’s mockumentary. However, as it is based on Molly Bloom’s real career, it becomes a voyeuristic expose of the seedy world of illicit gambling, money laundering and racketeering that is inhabited by the rich and famous. What is not clear is why this film was made at all. For those interested in professional poker, it no doubt has much to offer. Molly’s character has few redeeming qualities except being smart and ambitious, and she outshines every male around her. She is also clinically ruthless and emotionally distant, making her character difficult to embrace. Chastain plays all these characteristics to perfection.

Finding a worthwhile message in this film is a challenge. Perhaps it’s about a woman’s mastery of a man’s world, using both brains and conspicuous sexuality. Or perhaps it is found in the film’s closing minutes when, with condescending masculine authority, Molly’s lawyer says “you’re my daughter’s role model, and I’m OK with that”. He may be; many are not.

If you are in the first half of your visit on earth the chances are this film is not for you. Even viewers who have been here longer may find the film excruciatingly slow, painfully confronting, or both. Staring into the face of death can be like that. But if you have ever pondered the reason or sequel for your visit, the poignantly introspective essay on aging and death, ironically called Lucky (2017), may be one of the most honest films you have ever seen.

It may be a metaphor for life itself, but the plot is as insubstantial as it is profound. Framed by the wide and dusty Arizona desert, Lucky (Harry Dean Stanton) is a humourless and crabby 90-year old loner whose daily routines are repetitive and banal. We meet him at an aesthetic low point in his saggy underwear, meticulously conducting his morning yoga stretches in between puffing his packet-a-day lifetime habit. Just as he sets out on his daily pattern of visiting a shop or bar or wandering the streets of his small-time nowhere town, he notices a kitchen clock ominously flashing 12:00 and falls to the floor. His doctor confirms that the unhurt but dazed Lucky has nothing wrong with him other than being old.

The fall is Lucky’s epiphany for confronting his mortality and, as an atheist, there is no comfort to be found in a higher power. Not much more happens in this film. A friend deep in grief over his missing 100-year old tortoise named President Roosevelt becomes a dark comedic touchstone for the same inconsequential and inevitable fate that awaits Lucky and the audience. The doctor and the tortoise are hinge points that shape the sparse narrative; another occurs at a young boy’s birthday party where the usually morose Lucky unexpectedly sings a mournfully beautiful Spanish song. It is the only scene where Lucky appears to embrace the rawness of being alive. If there is a tension curve it snaps taut when he speaks the words “I’m scared” at what lies ahead; mercifully, the curve softens with a glimmer of optimism in the film’s final scene.

This minimalist narrative compacted tightly into 88 minutes feels so much bigger because it is. The film’s centre of gravity is Lucky’s face, where the camera spends a lot of time looking into the sunken sadness and deeply etched markings of decades gone by. It’s a face that rarely emotes except for annoyance, confusion, or fear, which heightens the contrast with his almost spiritual gaze while singing the Spanish lament that means ‘Going Back’. It seems odd to credit Stanton with performance authenticity given that, in reality, he is an old man playing an old man.

For many fans of Stanton and his long illustrious career, the film climaxes in two very different worlds. The fact that he passed away late last year at 91, and before he saw the film’s release, transforms his final work into something akin to an existential masterpiece.

There is no simple way to describe Phantom Thread (2017). It is complex and multi-layered, with exquisite filming, extraordinary acting, and an engaging narrative. It is also deceptive. What appears to be a period drama of romance and high fashion is closer to a dark, double character study, wrapped in a psychological thriller, overlaid with a satire on haute couture.

In 1950s London, the elegant House of Woodcock is where royalty and high society go for gowns made by revered fashion designer Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day Lewis). He is an obsessive-compulsive personality type who needs complete control of everything around him. His career began by making his mother’s wedding dress. Having never recovered from her death, he forever wants to create her image through his art. Sister and salon manager Cyril (Lesley Manvile) is the only person close to him and she wards off casual lovers as quickly as he tires of them. Young waitress Alma (Vicky Krieps) is different: she is awkward, bold, perfectly formed, and he wants to possess her. She is soon absorbed into the House of Woodstock as model, muse, then wife in a tense relationship where each wants to control the other. Alma struggles to please Reynolds and Cyril’s constant watch does not help. One day she learns about toxic mushrooms and stumbles upon a novel way to make Reynolds need her.

At one level, the storyline is transparently simple; at another, it is an intricate portrait of two damaged people who progressively peel back each other’s social and emotional disguise. Reynolds is manipulative, fastidious, and judgemental, but vulnerable and forever searching for a surrogate mother. Alma’s innocent appearance hides her own calculated determination to find his weakness and turn it into dependence on her. Without knowing it, they are perfect for each other.

The sumptuous cinematography dwells on the minutiae of this claustrophobic world: his love of fabric as a canvas for capturing beauty; his obsessiveness about how a meal should be presented; his revulsion at the slightest sound that intrudes into his space; and his disgust when unworthy women wear his creations. The camera tracks the shifting tension point of his overbearing dominance and her measured acquiescence in a sexless film that oozes repressed, even perverse, sexuality. Against this façade of fashion elevated to art, wealthy high-born women parade in Woodstock garments, radiating material beauty to mask their ugly selves.

This is a film rich in thematic ambiguity that remains open to interpretation all the way to its twisted climax. Alma’s motives are left vague, and it is unclear if Reynolds is a subliminal cross-dresser, a neurotic artist, or a toxic bully looking for control through the world of high fashion. Regardless of how you read the film, the performances of Daniel Day Lewis and Vicky Krieps are mesmerising. At two hours and ten minutes, it could have achieved more impact with thirty minutes edited out, but not all will agree. That’s a small complaint for a film that offers so much style and so much substance about so little.

There are many ways to tell a coming-of-age story, but all of them have similar moments of joyful and painful transformation from childhood to adulthood. While clichés are inevitable, the bitter-sweet dramedy Lady Bird (2017) offers a more nuanced portrait of angst-ridden transition to maturity. It stands out from the pack for the beautiful way it frames the story inside the universal love-hate mother-daughter relationship.

Like most teenage-girl films, this one feels like a prolonged melodrama because that is what it is. In a typical act of rebellion, 17-year old Christine (Saoirse Ronan) re-names herself “Lady Bird”. The inverted commas are for anyone who doubts her authorship or right to call herself whatever she chooses. Her depressed but genial father Larry (Tracy Letts) has not been able to find work and her mother Marion (Laurie Metcalf) works double shifts to keep the family afloat. “Lady Bird’s” Catholic upbringing in Sacramento is increasingly claustrophobic and her one dream is to get into an east-coast college that has “real culture” despite her grades and family finances. In the middle of this stock-standard middle-American family, the quirky brat “Lady Bird” battles her tough-love mother while juggling regular problems about friends, romance, and school….like any other teenager.

In the absence of an original narrative there is an abundance of great character acting, genuinely funny moments and a finely paced script. The film’s heartbeat pulsates in the unbreakable cord between mother and daughter. When it finally loosens, as it must, “Lady Bird” reverts to Christine and metaphorically turns into a butterfly. Saoirse Ronan is wonderful in this role, although at 23 years of age her adulthood sneaks through the 17-year old girl she is meant to be. Her facial expressions eloquently convey the crushing moments that mark the transition from girl to woman: like her first lover telling her that “you are going to have so much un-special sex in your life”, or her priest’s warning that “we never escape our past” when she is desperate to do so. Ronan’s performance relies on reciprocation and Laurie Metcalf is cast to perfection as her maternal foil. The pair switch from brawling cats to best friends in a single blink without loss of authenticity.

The joy of this film lies in its unembellished realism: there are no big belly laughs or comedic skits, just many little things that make you smile. “Lady Bird” is a heart-achingly ordinary, funny and smart girl from the “wrong side of the tracks”. Some viewers will recognise parts of themselves, others will enjoy the film through the lens of nostalgia or catharsis. For most, Lady Bird offers a mirror of the emotional, physical, sexual and transcendent moments that shapes our journey into adulthood.

The term ‘fourth estate’ was coined in 1841 by philosopher Thomas Carlyle when he said that the Reporter’s Gallery was far more important than the ‘three estates’ of parliament. This titbit of history tells us the battle lines over ‘fake news’ are as old as ‘the press’ itself. It is also the context for The Post (2017), a dramatic thriller and civics lesson about the media’s role in checking government power. The Post shows why the media is despised by despots; it is essential viewing for anyone wanting to better understand today’s shambolic attacks on the media.

The facts of the story became world news. By the mid-1960s, most Americans were losing faith in the nation’s prospects of an honourable conclusion to three decades of conflict in Vietnam. While various Presidents told Americans that success was assured, the top-secret Pentagon Papers revealed that national policy was based on a litany of lies. Former military analyst Daniel Ellsberg notoriously leaked the Papers to the New York Times, but publication was suppressed by court order. The rival Washington Post acquired a copy and had to decide whether to publish and risk the paper’s future, or not publish and lose the respect of its journalists.

A dramatic high-tension wire is strung between Post heiress and socialite Katherine Graham (Meryl Streep) and her hard-core news editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks). They are polar opposites: she is a darling of the establishment, uncertain of her ability and fearful of losing not only the business but her social standing. Bradlee is a truth-seeking journalist who mistrusts lawyers and would publish at any cost. Described as “the most highly classified documents of the war”, the President commands an army of lawyers threatening Armageddon if the paper goes to print. The film’s period set design is brilliant: the reporter’s room is a galley of buzzing typewriters and the printing press a mechanical maze of oiled steel grinding out papers in a frantic atmosphere of unrelenting deadlines. Against this background, the pre-feminist newspaper owner must make a decision that could bring down a President. When the choice is made, the Post must then face presidential retaliation via the Supreme Court.

This story requires no narrative embellishment, nor does it need dramatic performances to convey the high-stakes of an extraordinary moment. The casting of stars and support is excellent. Streep and Hanks give their most understated performances of recent times; no other contemporary actors could have filled these roles with their authority and authenticity. Spielberg’s direction keeps the events unfolding at a brisk pace to leverage the tension curve upwards while sticking close to the facts. This is masterful storytelling based on an important event that resonates into the modern era.

Auteurism is a key part of filmmaking mythology that leads us to view a film more favourably because of its director, actors, or cinematographer. Sight unseen, any film directed by Guillermo del Toro will attract superlatives like ‘masterpiece’, and such labels are now all over the sci-fi fantasy The Shape of Water (2017). It can be lonely for anyone to write against this tide.

Also described as an adult fairy tale, the story is set in a top-secret research facility during the 1960s Cold War. Mute cleaner Elisa (Sally Hawkins) lives alone in a small apartment above a movie theatre and lives a life of dreams and fantasy. As an introverted fringe-dweller she gravitates to other outliers, like her closeted gay neighbour Giles (Richard Jenkins) and her best friend and workmate Zelda (Octavia Spencer), an African-American who is also Elisa’s sign language translator. Elisa’s yearning for romance is answered when an amphibian monster is wheeled into the facility inside a water tank. The monster and Elisa form an immediate emotional bond and Elisa is determined to save him from the sadistic director Colonel Strickland (Michael Shannon). When the monster is scheduled for dissection Elisa and friends hatch a high-risk escape plan, with the increasingly deranged Colonel in hot pursuit.

This is a luscious production full of Gothic foreboding, dreamy underwater atmospherics, and repressed sexual desire. The kitsch retro laboratory evokes 60s sci-fi spoofs with a heavily saturated other-worldly colour palette. It is not a spectacular or even original set design nor is the monster convincing or scary. Like Elisa, he is mute and his aquatic outfit is little more elaborate than a party costume with big holes to let his lovable eyes shine through. In case we doubt who is the bad guy, the Colonel is the only one with a disintegrating gangrenous limb to signify the moral decay of male authority. Whatever narrative nuance exists is found in novel twists on the Beauty and the Beast fairy tale template where our heroine finds eternal love in a most unusual way. With neither the monster nor the narrative especially original, it is Sally Hawkins alone who holds our attention all the way to the story’s implausible ending. As she did so beautifully in Maudie (2017), Hawkins has a unique expressive talent for portraying firm resolve with fragile vulnerability.

All fairy tales have a message, although some are more obscure than others. Unlike the thematic coherance of the brilliant Pans Labyrinth (2006), del Toro has left The Shape of Water wide open for interpretation and many are applauding its ambiguity. However, like a Rorschach test, what you see depends on what is going on inside your head, whether it’s the pain of ‘otherness’ or the yearning for love, mystery, excitement, or escape. Which returns us to the label ‘masterpiece’: if you are looking for one, you will find it. Others will be more moderately entertained with an engaging adult fairy tale that has more than enough charm for a full film of enjoyment.

Using the Hollywood label ‘western’ for an Australian outback drama casts an odd cultural shadow over the achievements of Sweet Country (2017). At a Q & A preview in Sydney, director Warwick Thornton told the audience “people think in boxes so we need to call it something”. However, ‘western’ is an awkward box for an Australian tale of such contemporary relevance and cinematic beauty.

Set in 1920s outback Northern Territory, the narrative is deceptively simple. Indigenous farm hand Sam Kelly (Hamilton Morris) and his wife are lucky to work for god-fearing landowner Fred Smith (Sam Neill) who believes that all are created equal. Fred allows Sam to help his unstable war-veteran neighbour Harry March (Ewan Leslie) for a few days but it sours quickly and Sam kills Harry in self-defence. The rest of the story tracks the hunt led by Sergeant Fletcher (Bryan Brown) through treacherous country that is home for Sam. Eventually white man’s justice must be faced.

This is an outstanding film for many reasons. In terms of visual impact, it is stunning. The cinematography shows a deep love of country with majestic panoramas that dwarf humans. Rich red colour palettes evoke the hot, dry, heartland of an ancient land. The camera tracks seamlessly from wide-screen images to small details like a balletic sand scorpion or a cold hard bullet being loaded into a chamber. Scene after scene, we find symbols of the conflicted relationship between white man and nature; there are no words more jarring than to hear Indigenous people being referred to as “black stock”.

In terms of aural impact, silence has never been so beautiful. It takes some time into the film before we notice there is no musical score, and none is needed. As Thornton put it, when you stand in the desert there are no orchestral violins to tell you what to feel. Silence conveys the outback. You hear the rustle of leaves in the wind, the sound of a flowing river, horses’ hooves pounding the ground, and most confronting: the sound of a heavy chain being dragged across desert sand, manacled to the black hand of a fleeing Indigenous youth.

The casting is excellent. Bryan Brown and Sam Neill are almost cameo performers in their roles as hard-core outback characters. The emotional centre of the film, however, is Hamilton Morris. He speaks little and emotes even less. His face is a wide, impassive, deeply etched, and painful canvas that speaks of Indigenous people’s dispossession and barbaric mistreatment by armed invaders. Views will differ over whether the Johnny Cash cowboy ballad during the credits makes this more or less of an Australian story. This powerful but disturbing film reminds Australians of our history and need to reconcile with the past.

From its confessional title to inconclusive finale, I, Tonya (2017) is the kind of film that leaves you wondering why it was made. The fragmented mockumentary approach disguises a lightweight narrative filled mostly with deplorable people with few redeeming qualities. However, Margot Robbie’s compelling portrait of an abused skater-made-good turns an otherwise lacklustre melodrama into an engaging performance.

The pathologically unfiltered stage-mother LaVona Fay Golden (Allison Janney) was the kind of mother than nobody deserved. She forced her four-year daughter into ice skates and a life of verbal and physical abuse. Without ever once enjoying a mother’s praise, Tonya Harding (Margot Robbie) grew up a talented competitive figure skater who had nothing else in her life except Olympic dreams. To escape her mother, she fell in with another abuser Jeff Gillooley (Sebastian Stan) who became her husband. Despite the elite skating fraternity looking down on Tonya for her loud-mouthed brashness and being too poor to buy costumes, she competed at the 1992 Winter Olympics to win a fourth place. Retiring briefly, she mounted a comeback while her husband and his moronic friends arranged an inept attack on Tonya’s main skating rival Nancy Kerrigan. She recovered quickly yet the entire story leads to the question: what was Tonya’s role in the attack?

It is difficult to label this film: it is not a serious whodunit nor is it funny enough to call it a black comedy. The mockumentary technique leans heavily towards telling rather than showing and the narrative is disrupted constantly by actors shifting out of character and into the role of interviewee. But the effect of multiple narrators is to construct a swirling matrix of viewpoints, in the middle of which Tonya desperately struggles to find respect and belonging. Margot Robbie’s performance is outstanding. To convincingly play a girl from the wrong side of the tracks who was force-fed elite skating despite abuse from her mother, husband, sporting judges, and the media, is no small achievement. Whether the film makes a compelling case that we should care at all is another matter. With Tonya centre stage, the camera treads lightly over her abusers and leaves us guessing about her involvement in the Kerrigan attack.

If you are hoping to see some skating excitement the film will disappoint. There is a noticeable absence of narrative tension in either the characters or depicted events, yet the story engages our sympathy for Tonya. Themes like the discriminatory politics of elite sport and the social burdens of class and family dysfunction get a light airing, but it’s hard to see this as a message film. Those who remember the real Tonya and the attack will find it interesting. For others, the unusual story format and characterisations are more enough to hold your attention.

In the wake of several high-profile films about Britain’s greatest leader, is there anything more to know about Winston Churchill? The archives of history attest to the unique stature of this political figure: more remarkable is the surrounding folklore that has shaped British and world history. It is at this level that Darkest Hour (2017) is perhaps the finest film ever made about the Churchill legend.

The dialogue-dense plotline is tightly compressed yet massive in the scale of its largely unseen off-screen action. Set In the critical weeks of May to June 1940, Winston Churchill (Gary Oldman) emerges as the least objectionable candidate to become Prime Minister after the British Parliament loses confidence in Neville Chamberlain. As the film Dunkirk (2017) so graphically shows, the Nazis had cornered almost the entire British army at Dunkirk and their total destruction was imminent. It was the definitive turning point of World War II: Churchill must inform Parliament that if the British forces are wiped out in France, it may not be long before a swastika will fly from Buckingham Palace. Belgium, France and Holland are entering surrender negotiations and a political group still loyal to Chamberlain are urging that Britain use Mussolini as an intermediary to secure favourable terms for a British surrender. Churchill must weigh the saving of countless young lives if Britain surrenders against the loss of nationhood and life under Nazi rule. As history records, Churchill rejects appeasement and his speeches to the British nation declaring that “we shall never surrender” are still regarded as among the finest ever made.

It needs to be said that Darkest Hour does not add to, nor subtract from, what we know of these historical events: it’s power lies entirely in Gary Oldman’s tour-de-force performance. More psychological thriller than bio-pic, the plotline advances with electrifying gravity, painfully pausing to amplify the enormity of impending national doom. Oldman executes a brilliant screenplay with eloquence, belligerence, and a gifted gravel-voiced orator’s ‘call-to-arms’ like the world has never seen. As we saw in Churchill (2017),this is a profoundly mortal, flawed, and emotionally vulnerable leader: Oldman is simply brilliant in portraying the knife-edge balancing of two fateful options, both of which would shape the course of modern history like no other single event: surrender or risk annihilation. When President Roosevelt declined his personal call for assistance, it was indeed Britain’s darkest hour.

This film comes close to being flawless but for one scene that lingers with an air of compromised plausibility. With a Parliamentary speech about to be given, Churchill bolts from a rear car seat and into the London Tube. He enters a carriage full of ordinary citizens and soon has an audience of astonished gazes which become a single chorus urging Churchill to never surrender. Despite the rousing sentiment, the scene plays like a dream sequence from another movie. Perhaps this is trivial in light of what this excellent film achieves: a portrait of a leader who had the weight of the world on his shoulders and the courage to be guided by his uncompromising belief in the British people. As today’s British and American leaders offer more walls and less leadership, Darkest Hour is a reminder of what leadership actually means.

The winner of the 2017 Heavy-Duty Tissues Award can now be announced. The beautifully produced British film Breathe (2017) is an inspirational bio-pic based on the short life of Robin Cavendish who was the longest survivor of polio in the pre-vaccination era. That description does little to prepare viewers for what is a multi-layered period drama, with themes about assisted dying, disability rights, medical innovation, personal triumph over adversity, and the all-conquering power of a woman’s love. Amongst all of this are several good cries.

Set in the 1950s, Robin Cavendish (Andrew Garfield), a dashing young tea-broker, met the love of his life Diana (Claire Foy) at a cricket game. Before long, they are courting, married, and set for an idyllic yet modest life together until Robin is struck down by the paralysis of polio. At the time, the only prognosis was a short life tied to a hospital respirator. For the active Robin death was preferable to being tethered to an artificial lung, but Diana would have none of it. Close friend and inventor Teddy Hall (Hugh Bonneville) pioneered a wheel-chair with a battery powered respirator that freed Robin from a life inside hospital, despite advice that he would not survive outside for more than two weeks. The story traces their adventurous lives together, including a trip to Africa and a disability conference in Germany. Perhaps the film’s most disturbing image is a German hospital where polio victims are laid out in morgue-like boxes, kept alive only by mechanical respirators.

It is impossible to imagine this film being bearable without Andrew Garfield’s extraordinary performance, supported by Claire Foy in the equally demanding role of his wife. Garfield possesses one of cinema’s most expressive faces which he deploys to full effect as the mostly prostrated polio patient who can only speak a short sentence at a time between breaths. From the depths of wanting to die to the joyful heights of feeling his baby son’s skin against his face, Garfield communicates in a facial sign language that says more than the words of fine orators. Some viewers will fairly believe that Claire Foy is the film’s real star. Where Garfield is an emotional roller coaster, Foy is a powerhouse of defiant strength who refuses to surrender to polio or to her husband’s wish to die. If the film can be faulted, it may be in its polite sanitisation of what it means to depend on others for every bodily function.

This story is more about unconditional love than heroism. Robin was surrounded by caring and talented friends, including the inventor of the respirator wheelchair that gave him freedom. Most importantly, he had a wife whose stubborn loyalty forced him to push on where others may have given up. Robin became a high-profile disability spokesman because fate gave him the opportunity to advocate for others. This warm-hearted story illuminates a little-known episode of history that has been consigned to the archives of medical science. Take extra tissues, but you will leave feeling inspired.

How you see The Florida Project (2017) depends entirely on the lens you use. There are several options: it could be seen as a drama about a precocious free-range six-year old living on the edge of squalor; a reality-mockumentary about the gritty texture of life in the shadows of Disney World; or a post-GFC critique film that examines what inequality and hopelessness looks like in what is now Trump’s America. Of course, it can be all of these at the same time but the one thing it is not, is pleasant to watch.

There is no plotline in the traditional sense, rather a montage of moments in the pitiful ordinariness of living in poverty. Instead of a beginning there is an entry point; the middle has no discernible narrative arc; and the final chapter is inconclusive. Six-year old Moonee (Brooklynn Prince) lives with her unemployable stoner mum Halley (Bria Vinaite) in the run-down Magic Castle Motel adjacent to Disney World. It is temporary accommodation but most of the residents cannot afford to live anywhere else. The manager Bobby Hicks (Willem Dafoe) is a salt-of-the-earth humanitarian, dealing out tough love and genuinely caring for the residents. Moonee makes mischief just to watch grown-ups react: she is bright, funny, adventurous and likes junk food. The constantly slurred Halley struggles to provide food and shelter while Bobby tries to protect his wards from themselves. The trio are the human anchor points around a series of everyday happenings that are trivial, except that Halley’s inability to pay the rent inevitably leads her to renting her body and stealing, and state child welfare authorities intervene.

In many ways, the characters and events are not the point of this film. While the three actors excel in their roles, their performances feel like cameo roles or avatars for an underclass of people denied a fair share of their nation’s wealth. ‘The Florida Project’ was the name given to the massive commercial development that became Disney World, and using it for the film title is a metaphor for unfinished work. These Disney neighbours have no hope of paying for a ticket inside. The helicopters landing and taking off all day bring the incessant flow of wealthy tourists dropping in for fun but never seeing what lies just outside the lavish gates of this capitalist citadel. Viewers see it all through Moonee’s eyes, with camera angles at her height looking up at a world that offers her so little, expecting her to remain dispossessed.

Hardly entertainment, this is a deliberately disturbing film. Some commentators describe it as beautiful. It may be so only in the sense that an as yet uncrushed daffodil on a battlefield can provide aesthetic relief from what is ugly. Despite its joyless offering, young Brooklynn Prince shines a warm light into a dark place and Willem Defoe gives a quiet portrayal of unacknowledged heroism. Several viewers walked out of my cinema and it is obvious why. I’m glad I stayed, but the memory is far from sweet.

If you were impressed with the opening number of La La Land (2017) you will find the start of The Greatest Showman (2017) more electrifying, with more high-voltage music charging the entire film. But be warned: some will reject it for not being the original Barnum or because Hugh Jackman is not Michael Crawford or because the film plays loose with history. Ignore the naysayers: if you give in to it as pure entertainment, Showman is an original, vibrant, fast paced fantasy musical that raises the bar for the revival of this genre.

In just two musical numbers, the poor boy, P.T. Barnum, meets the well-to-do love of his life Charity, and in a seamlessly compressed time capsule, they grow up, court, elope, start a family, and he sets up a theatre in New York. Barnum turns out to be a natural self-promoter and impresario. He gathers a cast of misfits and fringe-dwellers, including a bearded lady, a dwarf, a tattooed man, the world’s fattest, tallest and strongest men; anyone who is different from society’s definition of normal. Difference attracts hatred, and critics and protesters are part of Barnum’s world, He strives for respectability by recruiting a prominent playwright and a world-class singer but suffers personal and financial setbacks that threaten the circus. Almost defeated by arson, he turns to the canvas tent and reinvents the modern-day circus. As each major scene segues into the next, it is carried forward with a musical number that weaves lyrics, rhythm, and melody to produce dramatic and emotional moments.

It is hard to not be swept away by the pace of action, spectacle, and colours of circus life. Far from the vaudeville-inspired Barnum circus music of yesteryear, Showman has the dramatic percussive beats, harmonies, and video-clip choreography of contemporary musicals that reach a new generation. The instantaneous grabbing power of “The Greatest Show”, the punch-the-air assertiveness of “This is Me”, the haunting melodies in “Never Enough”, “Million Dreams”, and “From Now On”, together with six other high-energy numbers create a soundscape that takes you beyond visual realism and into the realm of fantasy. Like all musicals, character and plot are only scaffolds for creating the bigger extravaganza of timeless ‘showbiz’. The film’s ensemble of diversity, dance, and vocal talent is perfectly matched to its objective of making you tap your feet and leaving you wanting more.

More than any other film genre, the fantasy musical is best judged on its total entertainment effect. There are themes relating to the acceptance of social outliers, pride before the fall, and redemptive healing, but this is not a sermon nor is it a factual historical adaptation. If you need an overriding message, the film’s theme song shouts unapologetic self-acceptance with “no more hiding who I want to be…this is me”. Don’t be distracted by the plasticity of personality and performance: that’s part of all show business. Above all else, this film is fun, fast, and musically delightful. In today’s world, we need more like this.

Call Me by Your Name and God’s Own Country are outstanding love stories in the loosely labelled gay-love genre. They illustrate the great strides being taken in the cinematic representation and normalisation of non-heterosexual relationship stories. Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri stands alone for its powerhouse depiction of anger and disempowerment in America today. Goodbye Christopher Robin and Maudie are my standout bio-pics of the year, and Gifted is a delightful feel-good story. A Ghost Story, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and Mother are highly original works from the chaotic absurdist genre that push the boundaries of conservative filmmaking. Finally, My Cousin Rachel and Mary Shelley stand tall in the period drama field and Churchill is one of the finest historical dramas of the year.

The ‘New Queer Cinema’ of the 1980s transitioned the depiction of gay people from victims to ordinary people with ordinary romantic relationships. In the following decades, gay love films became less and less transgressive as most modern societies evolved through cycles of tolerance to acceptance to celebration of love without gender boundaries. The beautiful coming-of-age love story Call Me by Your Name (2017) is an outstanding example of this proud line of film culture transformation.

It tells a simple tale of a 1983 summer holiday in the charming village of Lombardy in Northern Italy. Elio (Timothée Shalamet) is a nerdy 17-year old holidaying with his Jewish family in their picturesque villa amongst luscious vineyard landscapes. Each year his archaeology professor father takes on a doctoral student to assist research. Adonis-like 24-year old Oliver (Armie Hammer) arrives and is immediately popular with the parents and local girls. Elio is struck by his rugged good looks but resentful of his American confidence and apparent disinterest in Elio’s youthful attention. Almost in slow motion, Elio and Oliver begin to advance on each other, from tiny incremental moments like a pat on the back or accidental body contact to full frontal gazes that say so much without a word. The older Oliver knows himself and holds back, while the brashly unaware Elio is emotionally overwhelmed by what is stirred within. Inevitably they become lovers, summer ends, and pain begins.

This gentle narrative arc feels as uneventful as a languid lazy holiday lying around a sun-drenched rock pool. While the plot advances glacially, we don’t want it any faster. The filming style, sensual score, and visual pleasures of Italianate village life are in symphonic harmony with the eternal rituals of young love. To the extent that there is any dramatic tension at all it is in the creation of secret moments where the lovers connect; the shadow of illicit relations is ever present. A door slightly open in the background is the only cinematic device needed for the threat of discovery. Armie Hammer and Timothée Shalamet deliver exquisite performances and resonate with the imagery of ancient sculptural forms that elevate the body beautiful to the realm of high art. Drenched in eroticism and the lyrical yearnings of sexual awakening, the film achieves a universal story disconnected from the stereotypes of time, place, and gender.

Even a film as visually delightful and emotionally engaging as this is not free of criticism. A powerful but too brief monologue about truth to one’s self by Elio’s father deserved deeper exploration. At two and a quarter hours the film is overconfident that we share the director’s self-indulgent urge to linger. There are several hinge points in the final chapter where the credits could have rolled but instead opened another scene that felt anti-climactic; yet when they finally do roll it leaves you with a feeling of having had a remarkable cinematic experience.

If it were possible to name the dominant emotion swirling around the world today it would be anger. Its many causes include social inequality, political instability, and global brinkmanship, all of which create a collective sense of helplessness due to events and systems over which we have no control. Any film that gives expression to this anger is cathartic, and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017) hits this mark right from the outset.

Seven months after the rape and murder of Angela Hayes, her mother Mildred (Frances McDormand) is ready to explode. Local police investigations have stalled, she is not getting any updates, and she believes that much more could be done. She rents three neglected billboards and plasters three simple messages against blood-red backgrounds: “Raped while dying”; “And still no arrests”; and “How come, Chief Willoughby?”. The shocked town is instantly divided into those sympathetic to Mildred’s plight and those supportive of terminally ill Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson). Police are outraged, national media get involved, and Mildred’s son and former husband try to talk her out of her protest. Events spiral out of control: there are outbursts of police racism, homophobia, bashings, arson, a suicide, as well as community outpouring of sympathy for Willoughby and blame for Mildred. Undeterred and hell bent on revenge, she sets a course into nihilism without regard for the consequences.

Not since Network (1978) when enraged Peter Finch screamed “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore” has a film penetrated the global zeitgeist with such forensic accuracy. When Mildred lets loose, it feels good and right. McDormand’s powerhouse feminist performance makes this her film: no other contemporary actress does cold anger like she can and still offer a warm vulnerability to make us care. Harrelson is a complex opposite: reasonable, wounded, and compassionate. His likeability is the film’s greatest complication: while we share Mildred’s anger we also want to quarantine Willoughby, especially when we meet his beautiful wife and daughters.

Three Billboards is telling us that to feel human we sometimes must do extreme things. Whether you accept that message or not, this film offers a safety valve for anyone who feels crushed by the system. Labelling it a ‘black comedy’ is a loose fit for a film full of surprises where most of the humour is found in lightning fast one-liners laced with multiple F-bombs. The blackness lies in the moral ambiguity of Mildred’s behaviour: she is channelling eye-for-an-eye justice and it matters little if the wrong person pays. Whatever you make of it, this is a gripping film that you are unlikely to forget soon.

It’s easy to get absorbed in a story without recognising the bigger picture that frames the narrative. To describe The Secret Scripture (2017) as a woman’s diary of life in a mental hospital masks the darker narrative of horror perpetrated by the Catholic Church. Based on a 2008 novel of the same name, the film is part of the recent wave of disclosures about appalling misdeeds committed in the name of holiness across various parts of the world.

Set in Ireland from the early 1930s, the story traces the life of Roseanne McNulty who was falsely incarcerated in an Irish mental hospital owned by the Catholic Church. After more than 40 years as a patient, Rose must be discharged or moved elsewhere when the hospital closes. New psychiatrist William Grene (Eric Bana) discovers that she is mentally sharp and has meticulously recorded her life story across the pages of an old bible. In a complex series of flashbacks the elderly Rose (Vanessa Redgrave) recounts how, as a feisty young woman (played by Rooney Mara), she had fallen in love with Michael McNulty (Jack Reynor) believed by locals to be a British sympathiser. The new Father Gaunt (Theo James) takes more than a pastoral interest in Rose and tries to stop the affair. When Rose becomes pregnant and Michael is embroiled in the Irish Troubles, she is hunted down by local vigilantes for harbouring the suspected sympathiser. Enraged by the affair, Father Gaunt certifies her to be suffering from nymphomania and she is subjected to electric shock treatment and other abuses over four decades.

Great filming locations and stellar acting performances by Redgrave and Mara do little to save this film from its complicated and fractured web of episodic flashbacks. The constant shifts of time, place, and people is at the cost of narrative coherence and the contrived finale defies beiief. The narrow expressive repertoire of Eric Bana casts a pall of indifference over Rose’s existence as if she were a specimen in a hospital test tube. When it is revealed she is much more than that, Bana strains to emote with warmth or empathy and leaves you wondering why he was cast in that role. The transitions between the younger and older Rose are increasingly disjointed as the entire ensemble drifts towards its soap-operatic conclusion.

Uncertain direction and messy narrative means it is easy to lose sight of the larger story of injustice suffered by people like Rose at the hands of the Catholic Church. The moral perversion of Father Gaunt and the Church’s obsession to punish victims is left unexamined. Despite excellent filming and a well-crafted atmosphere of claustrophobic confinement, this film struggles to rise above a mediocre melodrama.

Brooklyn’s Coney Island represents unbridled fun but is also a metaphor for the fickleness of the American Dream. The promise of happiness calls out from behind facades of colour and bright lights but offers too brief respite from the harsh realities of life. Woody Allen’s Wonder Wheel (2017) uses this tension between appearances and reality in almost every scene.

Set in the 1950s, a messy plot is overlaid with a nostalgic recreation of the noisy atmosphere of Brooklyn’s fun fair that is run by social fringe-dwellers with spent dreams. Short-tempered Humpty (Jim Belushi) barely makes a living running the carousel wheel and lives with wife Ginny (Kate Winslett) in a cramped first floor apartment that was once a freak show gallery. The spectacle and noise of the carnival is a constant backdrop to the claustrophobic space that feels like a cage for prowling primates. Humpty struggles to stay off the booze while Ginny is a tormented soul in her loveless marriage. She lives out the memories of her abandoned acting career through a melodramatic affair with lifeguard Mickey (Justin Timberlake), the wannabe scriptwriter and know-all narrator who is always telling us how to interpret the story. Humpty’s estranged 25-year old daughter Carolina (Juno Temple) arrives, fleeing from the mob after talking to the FBI and needs a place to hide. She falls for Mickey and Ginny falls apart, but not before she stumbles onto a callous but perfectly undetectable scheme for murder.

Wonder Wheel has all the hallmarks of classic early American theatrical melodrama: the apartment set is designed around semi-enclosed stage rooms and the acting style is hyper-dramatized. It is heavy with dialogue and prolonged monologues that feel as if the film is trying hard to tell rather than show. Humpty’s temper tantrums are repetitive, Mickey’s pretentious narration is irritatingly self-indulgent and Ginny’s self-conscious and over-cooked ramblings become wearying. Like her budding pyromaniac son from her first marriage, she tries to crash and burn the things she hates in life without giving the audience a reason to care. She is desperate to play one of the oldest roles in theatre: the older woman who thwarts her rival for romance, runs away with the younger man, and is set free from her mid-life identity chains. But after the fun of Coney Island, reality must return and the wheel of life keeps spinning.

If you are a fan of theatre the performances might please but as cinema it feels forced. The script, dialogue, and characters are unconvincing, although the filming and period sets are excellent. While Kate Winslet’s performance is over-stylised it is memorable for its intensity. In the Weinstein/Trump climate, Woody Allen’s work is being shunned by many, but that is not why Wonder Wheel is struggling critically. Simply put, it is far from his best work.

Some genre labels are highly deceptive. The Czech Republic produced film The Teacher (2016) is labelled a comedy drama but there is little humour in this dark political satire about totalitarian regimes. Minimalist in dialogue and action, it paints a sombre picture for the youth of the communist world.

The storyline is simple but the atmosphere chilling. It is 1983 in Soviet-era Czechoslovakia and a long way from the child-centred education systems familiar to modern Western audiences. On the first day of school term, new teacher Maria Drazdechova (Zuzana Mauréry) asks each pupil to stand up and declare their parent’s occupation. As the powerful chairwoman of the local communist party committee she seems over-confident as the camera pays close attention to her notebook of free services to be called upon. When the pupils inform their parents what happened, a cycle of silent complicity is triggered. Low performing pupils whose parents agree to Maria’s hints, such as a free haircut, a fridge repair, or housecleaning, suddenly show an improvement in their school marks. High performing students whose parents do not curry the teacher’s favour see their marks and future career prospects spiral downwards; one even attempts suicide. School authorities are intimated and there is no higher avenue of appeal. Both parents and pupils know that something sinister is happening as their school becomes a place of terror.

The central narrative premise is so disturbing that little embellishment is needed to portray the moral brutality of a corrupt political system. Sub-plots of parent meetings and conspiring pupils add texture to drama. The desaturated filming palette conveys the cold fear of life under communist control and the acting style has a realistic, almost cameo quality that intensifies the trauma of Maria’s victims. Zuzana Mauréry and the support cast are largely unknown but are perfect in their roles. Mauréry is particularly effective in portraying a smugly callous disregard for her pupils with a veneer of smiling innocence that masks her ruthless exploitation. While the teacher may depict the corrupt face of totalitarianism it is the parents who reciprocate the mass compliance necessary for propping up such regimes.

It would be hard to describe this film as entertaining. There are few light moments and little to laugh at when depicting the communist way of life. Being sub-titled, some loss of dialogue nuance is inevitable but the message is unmistakable. With an authentic voice and sense of place, this is a gripping allegory for the moral corruption endemic to communism.

It’s not possible to write a spoiler for Wonder (2017): if you see the trailer you have seen the film. The beginning, middle and end are laid bare and no filmmaker would dare not have a happy ending for a child born with a facial disfigurement. The story has few narrative twists and turns, an absence of rising tension, and very little character development. So why see it at all?

The plotline is simple. Smart ten-year old Auggie Pullman (Jacob Tremblay) has been home-schooled by his devoted mother Isabel (Julia Roberts) in order to protect him from the outside world. Wherever he goes people stare at his face, so it has been a tough decade for the boy born with the rare facial deformity. Together with loving father Nate (Owen Wilson) and understanding sister Via (Izabela Vidovic), the family has prepared him as best they can so Auggie can attend a regular school. His encounters with the students are predictably human, as is the effect on the resilient Auggie. Every clichéd scenario we have seen in every coming-of-age film is played out over the ensuing school term: he is isolated in the canteen; laughed at in class; picked on and called a freak. But slowly, people look past his face and see a funny, intelligent, and kind boy who is no different from any other.

This could be one of the most emotionally manipulative films you will see in a long time. But it is also one of the most endearing. It all rests on the ability of the cast to reach out from behind the screen and squeeze your heart ever so tightly. The film belongs to Julia Roberts. She has one of the most expressive faces in contemporary cinema and the fear, pain and love she emotes as Auggie’s mum is palpable. Anyone who has had a mother will love her performance. Owen Wilson is perfect as a goofy but wise dad whose ‘tough love’ for Auggie is so empowering. Izabela Vidovic does a superb job as the teenage sister who lives in the shadow of her brother’s needs but loves him dearly. With extraordinary talent for such a young actor, Jacob Tremblay is a masked persona in the eye of an emotional storm. The story digresses into several character vignettes to show that even his cruellest tormentors have a back-story that merits sympathy for their behaviour. This is heavy-duty tissues territory.

Few will escape the emotional ambush of this film but you are sure to leave it on a high. Saturated with positive themes and messages, it is especially relevant to anyone who has ever experienced or witnessed bullying or has been shunned because they are different. It is filmed with a down-to-earth realism and a comedic touch that lightens its load but never laughs at the issues. You will not care about overdosing on Hollywood clichés because this delightful and inspiring film is worth every minute.

Box-office pressure compels filmmakers to make one film appeal to multiple markets. If you can plausibly mix a war story, a domestic drama and a coming-of-age tale into a bio-pic that appeals to all age groups you are on a winner. Goodbye Christopher Robin (2017) is certainly a winner.

All of these genre strands reveal a different aspect of the same story: that the author of the world’s most recognised children’s storybook character Winnie the Pooh had exploited his son to achieve literary fame. Alan Alexander Milne (Domhnall Gleeson) returned deeply traumatised after the ‘war to end all wars’, hoping to resume his fashionable career as a London playwright. His pretentious wife Daphne (Margot Robbie) wanted a daughter and never bonded with their son Christopher Robin (Will Tilston). They retreat to the countryside but Daphne quickly tires of rural life, leaving her husband and son for the London social scene. When his beloved nanny Olive (Kelly McDonald) must spend time with her sick mother, Christopher finds a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get to know his father. It is during this short period that the ‘Winnie the Pooh’ legend was born.

The film has a narrative structure that allows the story to move between genre strands and across several decades. The effect of these shifts is to tell the story from Christopher’s point of view both as a child and later as a young man after World War II. Through his childhood recollections, the adult Christopher shares his loneliness and deep resentment over the endless interviews and public adoration for the ‘boy with the bear from the 100 Acre Wood’. The story reveals that instead of little Christopher Robin being the luckiest boy in the world he was the saddest.

This is a beautifully told story which unfolds gently to leave the Pooh mythology as undisturbed as possible. The filming is lusciously saturated with many scenes having a painterly picture-book quality evocative of childhood nostalgia. Casting is superb, with the impossibly adorable and mega-dimpled Will Tilston stealing every scene in which he appears. Domhnall Gleeson is excellent as the war-damaged author who turned to writing fantasy to ease the trauma, and Margot Robbie is perfect as the emotionally vacuous parent for whom mothering was an embarrassing inconvenience. The dialogue-rich script is peppered with whimsy, intelligence, and the starchy middle-class manners of Britain in the war years.

With top-shelf production values it is hard to fault this film, except of course if you are a historian. Several have questioned the facts upon which the story is based and they always will. Or perhaps you are a Milne fan hoping to hear his prose and feel cheated by the fleeting references to the characters and settings of his work. However, judged on its cinematic merits, the delightful Goodbye Christopher Robin is one of the most enjoyable and entertaining films of the year.

Few people know that Wonder Woman was created by the psychology professor who invented the lie detector. That’s one reason why Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (2017) is an intriguing period bio-drama. The others concern why Harvard fired the professor and why Wonder Women is in the plural form.

Based on a true story set in 1940s America, William Marston (Luke Evans) is one of the pioneers of psychology. His wife Elizabeth (Rebecca Hall) is a brilliant academic and a feisty feminist, and together they recruit Olive Plat (Bella Heathcote) to help in their research for a machine that can detect lies. The three-way sexual chemistry is immediate and explosive. When they begin their open menagé á trois, the conservative Harvard University dismisses them for immorality and they take menial jobs to survive. Wanting to become a fiction writer, William creates a fantasy animation based on the two women in his life. Adorned with symbols of female empowerment, it is an instant icon of the non-violent super-heroine he calls Wonder Woman. William becomes a successful cartoonist and Wonder Woman comics sweep America. However, in the pre-feminist age, moral crusaders persecute the trio for the lewd bondage imagery that allegedly is corrupting young minds.

This is a transgressive film in many ways. In addition to some beautifully rendered scenes of three-way sexual intimacy, it explores polyamorous relationships and the feminist psychology of bondage – radical ideas that challenge the conservative construction of heterosexuality. In the process of showing the trio exploring their emotional and sexual boundaries the viewer is drawn into reflecting upon their own. With same-sex marriage becoming today’s new normal, this film suggests that the evolution of human sexuality is far from over. It also explains that instead of being based on subversive psychology, Wonder Women is really a role model for peace-making, feminine agency, and sexual liberation.

The three principal actors perform seductively within typecast roles. Rebecca Hall depicts a powerful intellect and feminine sensitivity; Bella Heathcote portrays extraordinary beauty and strong determination; and Luke Evans, perhaps the envy of many male viewers, is a masculine intellectual and a genuine new-age feminist. The filming evokes the era with authenticity, the script is intelligent, and the iconography that led to the creation of Wonder Woman is assembled like scattered clues in a detective thriller. Similar to the film Mary Shelley (2017), the film also shows how great creative works are the embodiment of their author’s life experience. In this way, it is engaging, informative, and entertaining.

If your cup is always full don’t waste your time with this film. For the rest of us, it is a guilt-inducing reminder that our cup may be fuller than we think. Although it is light on big laughs and it does not have a big narrative, Brad’s Status (2017) delivers a film-length interior monologue that probes our obsession with aspirational lifestyles.

Brad Stone (Ben Shiller) is not ageing well. When he starts comparing his half century of life with a few of his classmates he feels like a failure. Despite owning a small non-profit agency that helps people, having an attractive and loving wife Melanie (Jenna Fischer), and a remarkably well-adjusted teenage son Troy (Austin Abrams), Brad has a gnawing sense of inadequacy. He sees his old high school friends living fantasy lives, like retiring to a tropical island, wallowing in celebrity, and flying around in private jets. Troy’s visit to the east coast to pick a college is a chance for father-son bonding but all it does is remind Brad that he is a loser. He cannot score an airline seat upgrade to impress his son, he can’t seem to even win the respect of hotel check-in staff; in fact, nobody really notices Brad. But through Troy’s mature young eyes, Brad is a great dad.

This is not a film for everyone. The action and tension curves are close to flat, while Brad’s introspective narration is a mid-life crisis tale that sounds like middle-class aspiration syndrome. It’s possible to see Brad as an avatar for the ills of modern society. The dialogue is self-indulgently immersed in the politics of envy and the quest to self-legitimise through material possessions and public success. He is a victim of conservative individualism where self-interest has a higher moral value than public interest. His self-doubt will resonate for many and Ben Shiller is cast perfectly for the role. He plays Brad with a kind of Woody Allen-style angst-tinged whimsy which may tire some while amuse many. His son is his emotional foil, and young Austin Abrams plays the part with deadpan wisdom beyond his years and amusement that his weird father should struggle so much over so little.

The message of this film lies buried under its comic treatment of a bland story. The blessings in Brad’s life are obvious to us but not to him, as are the several reasons to doubt the people he admires. Brad’s Status is a warm-hearted tonic for anyone afflicted with anxiety over what life has not provided. When taken in the right dose, it is both uplifting and entertaining.

It will surprise some people to know that the first science fiction novel Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus (1818) was written by the 18-year-old wife of celebrated poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. This literary classic was the product of a restlessly creative mind, emotional turbulence and stifling Georgian social pressures. All of it is captured by the sumptuously filmed historical bio-pic Mary Shelley (2017) which tells the story of a romantic rebel and literary feminist who spoke for her times.

The simple plotline is saturated with the tropes of feminist melodrama. An avid reader of ghost stories, the precocious Mary (Elle Fanning) was raised by author William Godwin (Stephen Dillane) after her mother, the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, died soon after Mary’s birth. Encouraged to find her own writing voice, she spends her time turning her imagination into private stories until the day she is swept off her feet by the dashingly handsome Percy Shelley (Douglas Booth). As Percy is already married, scandal follows and they are cut off by their families. They run away and live happily in bohemian squalor until Mary loses her own child and Percy has an affair with her half-sister. When challenged by the decadent poet Lord Byron to write a ghost story, she draws upon her experience of abandonment, her fascination with mortality, and her tempestuous relationship with Percy to write and publish the immediately popular Frankenstein.

Successful bio-pics of great literary figures are generally character studies more than plot-driven narratives. From a literary history viewpoint, the film’s greatest achievement is in showing how Dr Victor Frankenstein’s destructive monster was itself the embodiment of Mary’s emotional world. The story is powered entirely by Elle Fanning’s brilliant performance. With an extraordinary expressive range for a young actress, she can transform herself from pain and anguish to romantic ecstasy with a simple transcendent smile that jumps off the screen. Douglass Booth is superb in his supporting role, playing the self-indulgent poet scoundrel to perfection. As you would expect with principal filming in Dublin, the sets are gorgeously authentic and the filming style deliciously gothic.

Some critics have bemoaned the decision to introduce Frankenstein only towards the end of the film. To do otherwise would have turned the novel into the subject and weaken the film’s focus on the writer. There is great storytelling at work here: it balances period drama, feminist history, romance, and a portrait of creative genius, making this a film of many labels. It is also a satisfying psychological deconstruction of how a literary work can be a mirror of a writer’s life.

All filmmaking is exploitative. Whether it is fair or not will depend on many things, one of which is the respect shown for the film’s subject matter. Many movies are marketed as fact-based but really only exploit history to create entertainment. This is the case with Detroit (2017): a gripping drama but a poor historical account of the worst public disorder in the US since the Civil War.

Understanding the broader context is important. The Detroit race riots were part of a national wave of civil unrest that swept America in ‘The Long Hot Summer of 1967’. There were 159 documented riots across a nation mired in a long history of slavery and systemic discrimination against its African American population. Detroit (2017) compresses the painful history of American racism into a few minutes of simplistic animation followed by archival footage of widespread racial unrest, burning buildings, mass protests, and police confrontations. Most of the two and a half-hour film then presents a prolonged dramatisation of a single episode of police brutality that occurred after the raids that triggered the riots.

The early part of the film shows a number of sub-stories coming together as a result of the raids. In the midst of the chaos a group of fleeing African Americans are detained and interrogated in the Algiers Hotel after what was believed to be sniper fire on police and national guards. The handful of police are led by officer Philip Krauss (Will Poulter) who is already under threat of a murder charge after shooting a looter. He is sadistic in his methods. The suspects are kept facing a wall while one by one he applies terror tactics to make them inform on the so-called sniper, even staging fake killings to maximise panic. It is an agonisingly long and repetitive process, during which deliberate and accidental fatalities occur. The film concludes with a brief account of the courtroom drama in which the white officers face a white jury for a predictable outcome.

Viewers hoping for a balanced picture of the Detroit race riots of ’67 are unlikely to be satisfied. Instead of looking at the climate of hatred for black people, the film presents a ‘bad-apple’ account of one psychotic policeman with a taste for torture. The portrait of cruelty is performed to perfection. Poulter fills the role with callous indifference to pain or fear and it is his cold-blooded performance that drives the tension curve to its inconclusive finale. While there are many strong performances by others, this is virtually a one-man tour-de-force portrait of right-wing white supremacy.

This film is entertaining if you have a taste for prolonged violence. Others may feel that the Detroit riots are being exploited and that racism deserves more respect than a tale of a lone psychotic. A redeeming feature is its timing. It arrives half a century after the depicted events, while alt-right forces of the world are again on the march. Detroit reminds us how ugly civilisation can be.

Absurdism is an art-house genre that messes with our brains by turning logic on its head. The filmmaker scatters a few clues throughout the film and leaves the audience to make whatever sense of it they can. A superb example is The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), a film full of conflicting clues that will make many viewers wonder if they are watching a supernatural horror, a psychological thriller, or a black comedy.

The bare bones of the story are easy to describe but their meaning less so. Successful heart surgeon Steven Murphy (Colin Farrell) saves many lives but one day he operates after a couple of drinks and the patient dies. With life and death in his hands, an occasional failure is normal. Some years later Steven spends time with his daughter’s friend, the loner Martin (Barry Keoghan) who says he wants to be a cardiologist. Martin ingratiates himself into Steven’s family and begins a relationship with the surgeon’s daughter. When Steven tries to stop all contact, Martin reveals that Steven killed his father so Steven must kill one of his own family or all of them will die. Inexplicable symptoms appear in his son and daughter which force Steven to make a horrific decision.

The narrative is weird enough but its presentation gives the film an extraordinary atmosphere of horror. The word Sacred in the film’s title is the first clue that this story occupies a space beyond logical realism, somewhere in the eye-for-an-eye cosmos where a wrong must be held to account. Absurdism frees the filmmaker from conventional logic to make the audience question their taken-for-granted world: like, why should a surgeon not atone for a tragic mistake? The filming style accentuates the outer-worldliness of what we see: subjects are framed to look small against massive walls; panoptic shots render humans as trivial objects from a universal gaze, while some tracking shots feel like the camera is running along the ceiling looking down on human panic.

While the camera creates the visuals, the performances portray humans being under the control of an unknowable force. Outwardly refined and successful, the Murphys are strange people. Steven and wife Anna (Nicole Kidman) deliver deadpan dialogue and wooden body language, and their sex life relies on one of them imitating a comatose patient. As bizarre symptoms appear in their children and medical tests fail to find a cause, Steven turns on Martin like an animal caught in a trap. When science cannot help, he knows that a higher force is in control. There is no logic in what is happening and no causal link can be found. Brilliant photography and powerful acting combine to continually raise the psychological tension to a bizarre finale.

Absurdism often depicts a form of moral dystopia; it is also the code for understanding Sacred Deer. Some will see Martin as an evil force; others will see this as a psychotic episode or maybe it’s just natural justice being served. But the film remains in the moment: never questioning why things are happening, always mired in its own experiential strangeness. More than anything else, it is this lingering quality that makes it an engaging and memorable film.

How could such a beautiful looking movie fall so flat? Sumptuous filming, a stellar cast, with brilliant period sets and costumes are not enough to disguise the fact that Tulip Fever (2017) drowns under the weight of its own plot contrivance and melodramatic performances.

Set in 17th Century Amsterdam, it tells the story of an orphan who “arrived barefoot and left in a carriage”. Selected to marry for her great beauty, Sophia’s (Alicia Vikander) sole purpose is to bear a child for wealthy merchant Cornelius (Christopher Waltz) whose first marriage was barren. Cornelius commissions struggling artist Jan (Dane DeHaan) to paint their portrait to celebrate his wealth and her beauty but the artist immediately falls under her spell. While the affair progresses, her maidservant Maria (Holliday Grainger) falls pregnant to a fishmonger and the two women concoct a subterfuge whereby Sophia pretends to be pregnant to keep Maria’s secret. As a background sub-plot, Jan seeks his fortune in the over-heated tulip market by purchasing the rarest of tulip specimens from an imperious nun (Judi Dench). Melodrama turns into farce as the multiple narratives interweave, tighten, yet ultimately go nowhere.

High visual production values do not make up for story implausibility. The months of unsuccessful mating between Cornelius and Sophia is portrayed as a bawdy comedy of nightly rituals where Cornelius struggles to perform his marital duties. The affair under her husband’s nose, the fake pregnancy, and fake birth are all ludicrously implausible. The background tale of wild speculations on the fickle tulip market is a distraction rather than necessary for Jan’s predictable investment outcomes. The script sounds unnatural and dialogue is delivered unconvincingly: many lines are spoken across class boundaries in ways that would have been unimaginable in that era. With a top-shelf cast, the acting is flawless although Alicia Vikander stands out for the way she plays the same Alicia Vikander that we have seen in several films. The chemistry with both husband and lover is of the barely flickering variety, and her impersonation of Mona Lisa is, as always, impeccable.

Does the film’s ending justify the effort? Disappointingly, no. The fate of all the characters is disconnected from the narrative flow and the storyline threads remain dangling in the wind. For some audiences, the beauty of this production will be worth the commitment. However, after an hour and forty-five minutes, all we learn is that great beauty, wealth, greed, and deception, do not bring happiness; nor do aesthetics alone make a great movie.

Nothing riles the commentariat more than dashed expectations. With George Clooney at the helm of Suburbicon (2017) many expected something special but instead are using much less charitable words. The almost unanimous condemnation of this film is difficult to fathom. When a movie is so widely panned it means either it is a disaster or that it pricks a collective raw nerve somewhere, for some reason. This movie is not a disaster.

Controversially, the film comprises two apparently unrelated plotlines, part of which is based on a true story. Set in 1950s middle class America, Suburbicon was a peaceful all-white neighbourhood until the African-American Mayers family moved in. The white community objects and the local progress association builds a fence to wall off the newcomers. Community anger escalates until permanent crowds are stationed outside the new family’s home, harassing them to the point of violence, television coverage, and police intervention. This background story inter-cuts to a neighbouring family, the Gardners, who are in the middle of a home invasion. Two thugs tie up then chloroform the family, in the process killing Mrs Gardner (Julianne Moore). Soon her twin sister Margaret (also Julianne Moore) moves in to be with widower Lodge Gardner (Matt Damon) and son Nicky (Noah Jupe). It is not long before questions are asked why the loving husband doubled the life insurance on his wife. Mafia connections, an insurance fraud assessor, and a police investigator start lifting the lid of this perfect Suburbicon family. The two separate storylines are narratively linked only by Nicky and the Mayers son becoming baseball friends.

This is a brave way to frame a movie. Either storyline is enough to power an entire movie but running both in parallel appears muddled and narratively diffuse. However, if the viewer’s frame of reference is raised to the overarching level of conservative white American values, then both stories are intensified by their contrast with the other. Keeping the Mayers community racism story in the background and the Gardners domestic crime story in the foreground makes the audience complicit in a glaring social injustice. The Mayers are anonymous, passive victims who are barely seen while we see much of the angry white mob who self-righteously claim the right to live in a white America. Although the general trajectory of both stories is predictable, there are enough twists and turns to keep the tension rising until the film’s finale. Across both stories, there is little subtlety or nuance, and the heavy-handed and obvious symbolism is the film’s greatest fault. But for Hollywood cinema, that is not a hanging offence.

This dark comedic drama is engaging and entertaining. It captures the tones, fashions, and décor of the era, and the acting relies on stereotypes rather than character development. None of the characters compel emotional investment, so the space is left open for the action to do the talking. Filming coincided with the 2016 American election and, like many good filmmakers, Clooney wants to make a political statement. Calling this film a failure is rhetorical hyperbole. It is an audacious and innovative approach to telling a bigger story that just won’t go away.

It is absurd that any filmmaker would try to snapshot an entire nation in one movie, but Three Summers (2017) comes very close to doing just that. Almost every social and political issue that is near and dear to the Australian heart is brought together in one big tent full of ethical potpourri with lashings of larrikin humour and subversive irreverence. What’s not to enjoy?

The structural frame that holds the film together is both elegant and contrived. Multiple storylines are interleaved across three successive years of ‘Westival’, a fictional country music festival in Western Australia. There is no plotline as such: it’s more a montage of stand-up gags and music intended to reflect our changing social values over time, warts and all. Narrative continuity comes from following the romance between pretentious theremin player Roland (Robert Sheehan) and down-to-earth pub band fiddler Keevy (Rebecca Breeds). We meet a cross section of Aussie caricatures: festival radio announcer Queenie (Magda Szubanski) who doubles as narrator; a racist bigot (Michael Caton); an alcoholic father (John Waters); recidivist caravan dwellers; a cast of Indigenous and migrant identities; and a stone-faced security guard (Kate Box) who keeps stealing her scenes. Between them, they skip all too lightly across issues of race, class, colonialism, refugees, sexuality, musical culture, and national history.

Few of these issues are inherently funny or lightweight and if the gags were read from script they would struggle to get a chuckle. But timing is everything and in the hands of this ensemble it is all great fun. The actors play to stereotype rather than well-developed characters, except for Rebecca Breeds whose role traverses a wide emotional terrain. The warm spot is the romance between Roland and Keevy, which is as rocky sweet as their music is brilliant. The filming is exuberantly colourful and lively, lifted by a score full of festival joy drawn from a variety of musical genres. The quirky humour works on visual irony, such as when Michael Caton ridicules Indigenous dancers because of their native adornments while he himself wears a comical Morris dancing costume. Amidst the self-deprecating sendups of real life there are many issues that prick our national conscience, such as our unresolved relationship to the Indigenous owners of the land we invaded and our treatment of refugees. It is implausible, however, to suggest that the three-festival timeframe is enough to see substantial changes in attitudes; die-hard racists do not become exemplars of inclusion that fast.

Whatever faults one can find, none detract from the film’s enjoyment for both Aussies and overseas audiences wanting to know us better. Good-natured and big-hearted gags are entertaining, but the film’s bigger purpose is hidden inside the squirm-in-your-seat humour that holds up a mirror to the dark side of the Australian character.

Australia is on the verge of a social milestone in the gay rights movement as it awaits the result of the marriage equality survey. This makes the historical bio-pic Tom of Finland (2017) a timely reminder of the dark history of homophobia and the liberating power of equality. It is a true story of an artist whose work became the rallying iconography for gay pride.

We meet Touko Laaksonen, aka Tom of Finland (Pekka Strang), at the end of his Finnish military service just after World War II. The army was an oppressive environment for a gay man at a time when homosexuality was a crime. Inspired by the machismo of military uniforms, Tom secretly developed what became a universal artform that became emblematic of gay culture. His sketches depicted the exaggerated muscularity and sexual power of a social underclass that was regularly lampooned as effeminate, passive and weak. Leather-clad riders on powerful bikes with bulging genitals were regarded by authorities as pornographic but they became iconic self-identity images for the gay community. His early work was dangerous: while being interrogated under suspicion of being gay, a policeman tells him “we used to throw scum like you into concentration camps”. While he was an underground criminal in Finland, he was a hero in America. When he arrived in California he was overwhelmed by the openness of America’s gay culture, and throughout the 60s and 70s sexual revolution his work was widely exhibited and published. Today he is lauded as one of Finland’s heroes.

This story engages at several levels. It is a tale about a gay man’s coming out in a repressive society and the global impact he had on the recognition of the LGBTI community. That alone is a big story. But beyond the bio-pic narrative, there is a larger story about the power of art to transform the human condition. Across millennia, art has objectified physical beauty for visual pleasure. Tom’s creative sketches beautified the male body in a way that re-defined gay masculinity, empowering those suffering from persecuted sexuality. The strength of the film is in its capture of the mood, fashion, and upheaval of the times. In its two hours spanning four decades of change, it leaps across time and space with editing that can feel disjointed. The cinematography is excellent and the filming palette portrays the gloom of repressive Finland, brightening into the kaleidoscopic colours and music of free America. Key performances are played with understated realism to emphasise the role of Tom’s art in social change rather than Tom as a person.

If you have ever wondered what inspired the butch styles made famous by the Village People, now you know. Regardless of where this film is seen, Tom of Finland (2017) is a reminder of just how long it has taken for the gay community to enjoy equal rights and the struggles that still remain. This interesting well-made film sheds a warm light on an artist whose work has left a lasting impact on the creation of a more inclusive society.

One of the many ways that European and Hollywood films differ is that the former are willing to dwell on the ordinary while the latter usually prefers to make stories bigger than they merit. The French film The Midwife (2017) is an example of storytelling that works simply by putting two very different women together and watching how they resolve the webs of emotion that have become tangled over time.

As she approaches her 50th birthday, devoted midwife and single mother Claire (Catherine Frot) faces professional upheaval when her clinic must close. Her orderly conservative life is fractured further when the woman she blames for her father’s suicide suddenly makes contact after 30 years. Opposites in every way, Beatrice (Catherine Deneuve) is manipulative, irresponsible, and a chronic gambler who loves fine wine and rich food. Claire’s suspicion that Beatrice wants something is proven correct when the latter confides that she is dying, homeless and without support. Initial rejection turns into understanding for the midwife whose instincts are to nurture life, as she juggles the needs of Beatrice, the clinic’s closure, and her neighbour’s romantic advances. When her son announces he is quitting medical school and his girlfriend is pregnant, the always competent Claire confronts being helpless in a sea of change.

These narrative strands and their complications are not what sustains the story. Rather it is the way these two icons of French cinema fill out their roles and the emotional connections they make. The flamboyant Beatrice is dramatic and unfiltered, while the restrained Claire is measured and well aware of the other’s character flaws. One is a taker, the other a giver, yet both are engaging in different ways. As Beatrice confronts her fate, Claire continues bringing new life into the world in several very moving childbirth scenes that anchor the earthy realism and ordinariness of the story. The filming style dwells on warm and intimate moments, capturing both the charms and emotional swirls of French village life. Great acting and filming complements a script that finds uncontrived humour in everyday places.

Richly nuanced performances in the European cinematic tradition are at the heart of The Midwife. This is not a film that offers rising tensions towards a big resolution. Instead you are likely to leave the cinema with a bitter-sweet afterglow that comes from sharing moments of unbridled joy, sadness, and the ambivalent ordinariness of our existence.

The universal panning of The Emoji Movie (2017) is not deserved nor is it the worst movie of the year. It is easy to dismiss an animated film that satirises how humans communicate. However, it does raise serious issues; so if you are not interested in hearing a defence of the film, stop reading now.

There are a number of levels at which The Emoji Movie can be read. If you expect conventional narrative logic, characterisation, emotional impact, clever script or technical originality, you will inevitably be disappointed. But if you are looking for an imaginative take on today’s mass communication culture, it is an interesting film. The animated story unfolds inside the nano-world of a smartphone, amongst the apps populated by emoji. We see ‘life’ from the viewpoint of Gene who, on his first day in the emoji directory, is deemed dysfunctional because he shows more expression than allowed by his single-dimension ‘meh’ persona. When the phone-owning teenager selects Gene to send to his girlfriend it causes communication chaos in both human and smartphone worlds. Gene becomes a doomed emoji and must flee Textopolis in search of reprogramming, passing through firewalls and big-name apps like Instagram, Spotify and Twitter. He teams up with another obsolete emoji called Hi 5 and a love interest named Jailbreak, all with deadly bots in hot pursuit while the trio flee for safety in the Cloud. Doomsday approaches when the teenager decides to wipe his phone.

Ok, ok; you were warned that it is not a conventional film. So, what’s the point? One clue is the classroom teacher who explains to cell phone-dependent students that human communication was first recorded using ancient hieroglyphics, a pictographic language similar to an emoji directory. Despite the evolution of written communication over millennia, the use of single-meaning pictographic symbols has exploded. Is this the way of the future? While the film does not answer this question, it does offer an imaginative look into the world of smartphone communication. There is a social class system that groups emoji into favourites, ordinary, and rarely used, and the favourites rule the world with popular one-dimensional messages. Ambivalent or unpopular emoji are publicly persecuted and the trash is the ghetto of the unwanted. The Smiley emoji was the first ever made and it now exerts totalitarian control through a smile that appears happy but can also mask sinister intent. Gender politics rules the emoji and tomboy Jailbreak is really a princess in disguise who is desperately trying to avoid being treated like a girl. In other words, the emoji domain is a perfect mirror of the human world.

Nobody is arguing that this is a great film, but it is not a disaster. Decades from now it will be dug up and studied as a whimsical cultural artefact that portrays the imagined relationship between humanity and digital communication. Researchers will ask why hieroglyphics returned as a universal language and why humans came to rely on homogenised icons to convey meaning. If a movie can change the way you see things then it is worthwhile. This writer will never look at emoji in the same way again.

Director: Tony Leonidis

Stars: (voices) T.J. Miller, James Corden, Anna Faris

]]>https://cinemusefilms.com/2017/10/23/the-emoji-movie-2017/feed/3236 The Emoji Moviecinemusefilms236 The Emoji Movie3The Only Living Boy in New York (2017)https://cinemusefilms.com/2017/10/18/the-only-living-boy-in-new-york-2017/
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It’s tough but true: the 1960s and The Graduate (1967) will never happen again. Although the title of The Only Living Boy in New York (2017) is a nod to the iconic romantic comedy that was immortalised in music by Simon and Garfunkel, this new film is more of a twisty Woody Allen-style coming-of-age story about growing up in contemporary America. Same theme, different tune.

The film’s key narrative device rests on a young man meeting a stranger who is writing a book based on the young man’s life as it unfolds in real time. Twenty-something and nerdish, Thomas (Callum Turner) wants to be a writer and knows that he must experience the pain of living before he can write seriously. He has decided that beautiful Mimi (Kiersey Ciemons) is his one true love based on one night in bed but for her it was a bit of fun with a close friend. Thomas finds a stranger called W.F. (Jeff Bridges) sitting on his stairs who offers wise counsel despite efforts to avoid him. Soon W.F. is his muse and mentor and Thomas shares everything of his life and dreams. When Thomas discovers that his father Ethan (Pierce Brosnan) is having an affair, his worldview is shattered. He stalks the lover Johanna (Kate Beckinsale), confronts her, and ends up in her bed. It transpires that every relationship in Thomas’ life is not what he thought it was. Welcome to adulthood.

Calling the film Woody Allen-esque is shorthand for a storytelling style that depends on angst-laden whimsy. Thomas is a likeable boy whose emotional fragility is a result of family wealth, middle-class breeding, and graduate education, so it’s faintly pleasurable to witness his shocked awakening to how relationships work in the real world. What happens is nowhere near as significant to the film as how the characters react to unexpected change and the role of the mysterious W.F. Young Tom’s loss of innocence is followed by a primitive masculine urge, just as his father’s reaction to his infidelity being discovered is to exert brute force over others. While emotional worlds are cracking, W.F. listens and counsels, like an ancient omniscient narrator who also seems to shape the storyline as we watch. When his book is finished, so is the story except for a final twist that reveals who he is.

Stylishly filmed and well-acted by a stellar ensemble, the film is also an exposé of privileged life in New York, with enough insider jokes and cultural references to make most audiences feel like they are outside looking in. No doubt the glasshouse effect is intended, as it is possible to stay interested but disconnected from its characters and their feelings. If you prefer action-based movies, there is not a lot happening here. But if you enjoy a nostalgic revisit to early adulthood accompanied by evocative music in an urban bohemian setting, there is enough to keep you engaged in the movie until its satisfyingly unexpected finale.

]]>https://cinemusefilms.com/2017/10/18/the-only-living-boy-in-new-york-2017/feed/0235 The Only Living Boy in New Yorkcinemusefilms235 The Only Living Boy in New York3-halfThe Mountain Between Us (2017)https://cinemusefilms.com/2017/10/15/the-mountain-between-us-2017/
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Casting a dog in a movie is risky; it can steal or wreck the show and sometimes do both. The survival-romance film The Mountain Between Us (2017) is a two-hander supported by a lovable golden Labrador named ‘Dog’. Audiences may be increasingly immune to human tragedy, but life and death is taken more seriously when a pooch is cast in a disaster film to the extent that the movie’s publicity had to assure viewers that the dog is neither killed nor eaten.

It’s a simple tale without real surprises. Neurosurgeon Ben Bass (Idris Elba) and photojournalist Alex Martin (Kate Winslet) meet when their flights are cancelled due to bad weather. She is getting married the next day and he has an urgent operation to perform, so they decide to risk the storm and take a charter flight. When the pilot has a stroke, the inevitable happens and they are stranded on a snowy mountain without communications or hope of being found. With no food, there is only one option left: Ben, Alex, and Dog set off to find civilisation.

So how does the dog wreck the show? The film faces several plausibility and acting challenges that are adversely aided and abetted by Dog. The script and its delivery has an Alpine soap opera quality to it, with neither Elba or Winslet able to step out of their ‘all-wise strong doctor’ and the ‘injured helpless female’ stereotypes. Elba does a lot of intensive furrowing of those deep dark eyebrows which signals a neurosurgeon processing god-like knowledge and Winslet does a passable job of determined dependency. The simmering bond between them barely rises in temperature so all we are left to emotionally connect with is Dog. To make matters worse, whenever danger approaches we think of the most vulnerable first, and that’s Dog.

However, the real flaw is the glaringly obvious contrast between the couple, who are surviving on a few almonds a day after weeks of snowbound trekking, and the dog’s playful prancing through snow as if let out of the house after a big meal. The cold truth is that Dog is hopeless at pretending to be exhausted and the co-stars are not much better. Winslet’s makeup and good looks improve the more she treks and the less she eats, and Elba’s handsome beard stubble stays trim over weeks of hard slog with the only signs of exhaustion their breathless panting and slow-motion movement. As it becomes increasingly difficult to take this film seriously, a cabin appears with all home comforts plus two cans of soup. That’s when the film falls into a hole that not even Dog can save.

To be fair, the cinematography is outstanding, the mountain scenery is post-card beautiful, and even the digital effects are believable if you squint your eyes at the right time. The melodrama finds new heights in the final quarter when the simmering romance finally bubbles over into a glorious cliché that is mercifully brought to an end by the closing credits.

Nothing seems to anger the crowd more than a filmmaker who tries to improve on an original. After twenty-seven years, Flatliners (2017) is back with the same story but instead of a science-fiction horror it has been updated into a fictional science thriller. If you consider this film on its own merits and not dwell on how or why it is different from the original, this is an intriguing story with the potential to raise several complex issues about death and redemption.

By now the basic storyline is well known. Four out of a group of five friends who are medical students have their hearts stopped for a few minutes to experience death and peer into the beyond. The fifth is the group’s sceptic and conscience. Over several days, these gods-in-training take turns dying in an isolated basement ward, avoiding detection by hospital authorities. They record each person’s brain activity which shows elevated electrical disturbance in the minutes after death. Each of the four episodes encounters an emergency in the revival process and each has a heightened awareness or an enhanced ability after the experience. They also experience a flashback vision of a past mistake or error of judgement that must be confronted, and deal with it according to stereotype (spoilt rich kid versus poor kind girl). Of course, when you play with death anything can happen and each has a different demon to handle.

The film’s high-concept premise is the main star of the show: the cast are merely automatons who repetitively carry out the same scenario. The idea that it’s possible to see what exists after our heart stops has preoccupied writers and artists since the dawn of time. The medical science constructions placed around this story give it some degree of plausibility and the psychological trauma that follows each person’s experience are variations on the theme of ‘last-chance for moral redemption’. Given the constraints of the storyline, the acting is mechanical, clichéd, and unremarkable. But that’s not the film’s major problem: seeing the film’s premise repeated four times makes it tedious and takes away its only chance of developing any rising tension. By the time the last person is ‘put to death’ the film itself has irretrievably flat-lined and limps its way to a corny finalé.

It did not have to be this way. Regardless of how Flatliners (2017) differs from Flatliners (1990) there was ample opportunity to take the new version to a higher level. Today’s secular millennials are more aware than any generation before it and are curious to explore meanings of life from the perspective of death. The idea that in the twilight between life and death our worst sins come back to haunt us is not a spiritual or paranormal notion but one of earthly morality and redemption. But the film has no serious intentions. Like the young people it depicts, Flatliners (2017) is about thrills not intelligent discourse. In the end, the film gives us neither.

If you enjoy watching paint dry this is your film. Imagine an artist who is unable to finish a painting without needing to start again…and again. That is the basic premise of Final Portrait (2017). It’s a bio-pic that looks into the idiosyncratic mind of renown Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti (Geoffrey Rush) in a story so lacking in forward narrative that many will be left wondering why they watched it at all.

Based on real events, Final Portrait is an adaptation of a memoir by American writer James Lord (Armie Hammer) who is flattered when asked to pose for a portrait by Giacometti. Believing it may be a single session, it turns out to take almost three weeks of daily sittings. The artist lives amidst chaotic mess with a long-suffering wife who tolerates his obsession with a prostitute girlfriend. He hates banks; prefers to hide cash under his studio rubble; has few social filters; and is liked by all despite a tendency insult others. The portrait sessions are constantly interrupted by long walks, drinks at nearby bars, and frequent outbursts due to chronic perfectionism that ensures his works are never finished. He is unable to walk past his clay sculptures without making a change and some are so altered that they are reduced to stick figures. Lord’s amused and bewildered fascination with the life of a creative genius keeps him cancelling his return flight to America just to see his final portrait.

The nineteen-day timeframe feels like the same event repeated nineteen times (mercifully, with some time compressions). Along the way, we watch the deeply etched face of the cantankerous Giacometti as he grimaces in self-rebuke, lusts after his girlfriend, and gazes deeply into the gaze of James Lord to search not for the look but the inner soul of another human being. If you can forgive Geoffrey Rush’s Aussie-Swiss accent, there is much to admire in his characterisation of an angst-ridden artist. But it is also wearingly repetitive. Lord is the master’s foil as the suited slick-back straight guy. Initially adrift in the world of an erratic painter, he is conservative and upright yet his vanity is drawn like a moth to the flame of genius, eager to understand Giacometti’s creativity. While both play their part brilliantly, it is Geoffrey Rush who dominates the screen. The studio set is cluttered and claustrophobic, like the artist’s mind, and the cinematography employs the shallow depth-of-field effect to dwell on detail, allowing sharply focussed faces to peer between blurred works of art as if to say these are but points in time that will never find their final form.

There are ironies in watching a painter who studies his subject, while the subject studies the painter. It’s also a three-way mirror between audience, Rush and Lord. But such existential twists are not enough to elevate this film to a level of great meaning. Viewers enthralled by this field of art might enjoy the story but most others will struggle. It’s like a moment in time that lasts nineteen weeks, then is compressed into ninety minutes. There is little to look forward to as the ending has no more meaning than the beginning but is far more welcomed.

Historians have a way of sterilising cinema. So many words are wasted on whether a film is accurate instead of understanding and enjoying film as an artform. The Dancer (2016) is a bio-pic based on the life of Loíe Fuller who pioneered a hybrid dance performance that integrated visual spectacle and physical movement. Historians can fuss over facts, but others will enjoy what is an aesthetically intense story of creative innovation in late 19th Century Paris.

The story opens with Loíe (Soko) raised by her drunken father on a farm in America. A keen reader with a vivid imagination, she dreams of a career as an actress. After her father dies, she uses money stolen from a would-be seducer to cross the Atlantic in search of fame. She stumbles upon a Parisian theatre looking for a performer to fill the stage during interval. As a talented artist with an eye for design, she conceives of a dance act that disguises her modest dancing talent and creates a dramatic serpentine performance using a costume of batons and swirling bedsheets. Her act is immediately popular. Although physically arduous, the performance evolves to using silk, coloured lights, and dramatic music, and suddenly Loíe is the toast of Paris. When the talented teenage dancer Isadora Duncan (Lilly_Rose Depp) joins the troupe, the stress of dancing on Loíe’s body, her penchant to overspend, and her emerging sexual ambivalence, all begin to take their toll.

This is a luscious film to watch. Its rich colour palette, top-shelf production values and unconventional characterisations create the dramatic energy which drives the narrative. Undoubtedly, it is Soko’s physicality and her acting style that makes this film work. She has an almost androgynous beauty that the camera exploits; in some scenes she appears dashingly handsome, in others, sublimely feminine. With an emotive range that switches effortlessly from ingénue to sophisticate, she transfixes with her gender-free expressiveness, even under the on-screen competitive pressure of the beautiful young Isadora. The serpentine dance performances are mesmerising. They hang in a space somewhere between classical ballet, modern jazz, and a gyrating living sculpture draped in wings of silk accompanied by Vivaldi under spotlights. It’s easy to understand their immense popularity as a dramatic innovation in stage performance. Above all else, The Dancer captures this spirit of excitement.

Reading this film as history gets in the way of enjoying it as visual spectacle and engaging narrative. Loíe Fuller was praised by luminaries of her time, such as Yeats, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Rodin, but largely forgotten in her native country. The Dancer is a tribute to an avant-garde artiste whose legacy lives on in theatrical dance effects that have become an artform in their own right.

With sixty million golfers on the planet, you would expect a movie about the early history of golf to delight audiences all over the world. The game is rich in tradition and a spectacle for big-money professional sport. The historical drama Tommy’s Honour (2016) has much to offer for die-hard lovers of the sport, but most other audiences may find it rather dull.

The twin narrative inter-weaves the story of golf with the legend of the ‘Two Tommies’, the father and son team credited with launching the modern version of the sport. Set in 1860s Scotland, gruff Old Tom Morris (Peter Mullan) is groundsman for the famous St. Andrews Golf Club and he pioneered the early rules of the game including the 18-hole course standard. His 15-year old son Young Tommy (Jack Lowden) has grown up with game and becomes a better golfer than his record-holding father. When he beats his father’s record, tensions boil over and Tommy wants to go his own way while Tom clings to past ways. The young champion tours the country winning match after match, and collecting more prizemoney and social respectability than his father ever dreamed of. When Tommy falls for Meg (Ophelia Lovibond), an ‘older woman with a past’, the family is torn apart.

The story reveals several fascinating things about golf, including how the once-exclusive Gentleman’s Club sport became opened to universal participation and how big-money gambling was integral to the game. The primitive early equipment, the feather-stuffed hand-stitched leather balls, and the cow-paddock roughness of the course are interesting insights into the origins of modern golf. While the period sets, costumes and historical depictions have high production value, the characterisations and melodramatic performances leave the story muddled, tedious and repetitious. Old Tom is portrayed as a cantankerous domineering father who is difficult to like, especially for his regular rants against Tommy’s behaviour. His Scottish accent is so strong that many people will miss much of what he says. Young Tommy is the likeable one, although his attitudes to parental and aristocratic authority are far too modern for a working-class boy of 19th century Scotland. The dynamic between them is unremarkable and predictable, and the romance is subdued and uninspiring even though Meg provides the film’s aesthetic high point. The backbone of the story comprises the various games that Tommy inevitably wins, the monotony of which can quickly wilt the patience of both golfers and non-golfer audiences.

The decision to spend so much of the film watching the primitive golf games of yesteryear has robbed the story of any narrative tension. As an historical drama, it shows how sport has potential to break down class barriers although today’s private clubs would not agree. Anyone who loves and plays the game will wince at the sight of the early conditions under which it was played, but viewers unconnected with golf may struggle to stay awake with this one.

Every now and then a film comes along that defies traditional genre labels. The ‘documentary’ is a trusted label that promises to truthfully ‘document’ some aspect of the real world. Calling Mountain (2017) a documentary shows how inadequate labels can be for what is a film meditation on nature that leaves viewers to create their own message.

Mountain is a visual and aural ode to the beauty, mystery, and power of mountains. It draws on 2,000 hours of filming across twenty-two countries and is narrated sparsely and with solemnity by Willem Dafoe. The Australian Chamber Orchestra provides a rousing score that blends seamlessly with the visuals. The film showcases the world’s highest places rather than any individual mountain. Unlike the brilliant Sherpa (2016) which had a coherent social and political message, Mountain is a poetic meditation on mountains everywhere. It includes footage of early mountaineers as well as examples of the modern-day exploitation of mountains. It lingers over their majestic beauty, sneering briefly at queues of commercial trekkers, the clearing of ski slopes for paying customers, and the never-ending cable-cars, chair lifts and helicopters that move hordes of skiers and hikers. The film admires not only snow-covered peaks, but all kinds of mountains and all kinds of mountain activities, including people in wing-suits or on mountain bikes jumping off cliffs and climbers grappling up vertical rock walls where a single misstep can be fatal.

A higher aesthetic is created when you mix stunning mountain-scape cinematography with a superb orchestral score. It is spell-binding for at least half the time, and then the repetition and lack of narrative begins to bite. While the score enhances the visuals, it can also feel like one long musical cliché. Just as we can identify Jaws and Psycho by their signature musical tropes, the dominant orchestral effects in Mountain are predictable aural cues telling us that scaling cliffs is dangerous or that flying over a mountain peak will reveal a wondrous valley below. Some might ask why the film title takes the singular form when it shows many unnamed mountains in many unnamed countries. The reverence given to the subject does not include respect for identity or acknowledgement of place, so the film does not work as a travelogue. The anonymity of the mountains is also reflected in editing that often seems random and incoherent. In one second, a climber is scaling an icy sheer wall, in another, a mountain bike jumps off a ledge. The brief mention of harm caused by commercialisation is tokenistic and so much documentary potential is left unexplored. This means the film is about appearance not substance.

If this is a documentary, it is not clear what it documents. It would make a thrilling short film on a big screen or as a visual background to a live orchestral performance. While the individual aural and visual elements have great beauty, without a narrative purpose they are lovely to admire but all too easy to forget.

Unless you are a baby boomer, chances are you know very little about the feminist milestone that attracted one of the biggest audiences in the history of sport. In September 1973, 90 million people around the world watched a 55-year old former men’s tennis champion take on the 29-year old No 2 ranked women’s champion in a $100,000 winner-take-all tournament. The dramedy bio-pic Battle of the Sexes (2017) tells the story of a repressive era when women were routinely put down and lesbian was a dirty word.

Chronic hustler Bobby Riggs (Steve Carrel) had seen better days but was still active on the men’s senior tennis circuit. At the time, professional sport was a man’s world and Riggs was a professional loudmouth and self-promoter who publicly ridiculed women’s tennis. He stumbled onto an idea to challenge any woman player to a match, and then soundly defeated the world’s Number 1, Margaret Court. With an over-sized ego, he hiked up the prizemoney and world Number 2, Billie Jean King (Emma Stone), accepted the challenge. Sport, politics and crooked money was part of the scene, but the public only saw and got excited about the symbolism of gender war. They were oblivious to Billy Jean King’s struggle with her sexuality and the pressures of keeping it from her husband and the world. The match would make King a queen of her times.

This is a wonderful story, told with the right mix of irony, humour and pathos. It captures the mood of the 70s with all the fashion trimmings, the mood for change, and the fears of men as they saw patriarchal power sinking under the tide of the feminist movement. The dramatic tension rises steadily as the narrative moves towards the final battle, with the softer story of King’s love life interwoven but never intruding into the bigger picture. Steve Carrell’s portrayal of Riggs captures the obnoxious claims of masculine superiority that were trumpeted in the 70s, but he is unconvincing as an athlete who can play against someone half his age. On the other hand, Emma Stone is simply brilliant. She embodies the deep inner doubts of someone who has risen beyond her own expectations while dealing with the inner turmoil of discovering her attraction towards women. The filming style uses the handheld effect judiciously, and there are several macro close-ups of Stone and her hairdresser lover that are beautiful. While she plays King with nerdy understatement, she also shows steel resolve in taking on the male establishment in the interests of sportswomen everywhere.

Billy Jean King’s achievement in raising the status of women’s professional sport deserves to be enshrined in the annals of feminism, as well as sport and cinema history. It was 43 years ago and many today will look at the story as a distant time-capsule of male chauvinist history. But of course, we know it’s not over. The uncouth masculinity represented by Riggs still exists, even in high places, but is now called ‘boys’ locker room talk’. Battle of the Sexes is both an entertaining and an insightful portrait of an unfinished war.

Directors: Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris

Stars: Emma Stone, Steve Carrel, Andrea Riseborough

]]>https://cinemusefilms.com/2017/09/25/battle-of-the-sexes-2017/feed/9228 The Battle of the Sexescinemusefilms228 The Battle of the Sexes4Victoria and Abdul (2017)https://cinemusefilms.com/2017/09/21/victoria-and-abdul-2017/
https://cinemusefilms.com/2017/09/21/victoria-and-abdul-2017/#commentsThu, 21 Sep 2017 04:19:45 +0000http://cinemusefilms.com/?p=3792

Another impeccable British historical drama with another venerable icon of British cinema. What more can be said? Lots, actually. While Victoria and Abdul (2017) looks like more nostalgic self-indulgence wrapped in sumptuous period settings, it is also a cutting critique of British colonialism, a satire on aristocratic pomposity, but most of all, a bitter-sweet comedic story about the loneliness of being a Queen.

Her Majesty Queen Victoria (Judi Dench) has been monarch for 50 years and her boredom with royal occasions is palpable. Coincidence and luck leads to a lowly clerk Abdul Karim (Ali Fazal) travelling from India to present her with a medal in grateful recognition of British colonial rule. Court etiquette requires that one must never look at the Queen and to retreat backwards after addressing Her Majesty. When presenting the medal, the curious Abdul cannot resist a peep; their eyes meet, and Victoria is instantly charmed by the tall, good-looking Indian who appears so human in contrast to court toadies. She summons Abdul and soon he is her constant companion and mentor, much to the disgust of the racist lackeys who fawn for her favour. The relationship would last 15 years, during which time Victoria learnt about Indian language and customs. She developed a genuine regard for the nation over which she ruled as Empress of India.

While labelled a drama, the treatment is distinctly comedic. Court manners and customs are low-hanging fruit for mockery, and caricatures of court sycophants are all too easy to construct. But the humour masks the deeper layers of the story. Until she met Abdul, Victoria knew nothing of India and shared Britain’s official contempt for the ‘unruly land’ and its ‘ignorant masses’. Imperialism carried a divine right to rule over lesser humans and it was through Abdul’s influence that Victoria developed deeper sympathy for the nation and its problems. The relationship with Abdul is also one of the most liberating experiences of Victoria’s long reign and helped overcome the loneliness of royal isolation in her senior years. Judi Dench portrays this emotional transformation with extraordinary power: no living actress can match her imperious gaze. Her face has become more transparently expressive over her long career and even a miniscule raising of an eyebrow can speak volumes. The new spring in an old lady’s step, the twinkle in her eyes, the firming of her voice, all tell of the universal pleasures of connecting with another human, irrespective of any age divide. While Ali Fazal shares star billing, his aura is inevitably overshadowed by Dench. His greatest contribution to the film is being able to portray ambivalence between being just another sycophant or an innocent with genuine fondness for the Queen.

Historians will no doubt finds things to dispute and that is their job. As cinema, however, this is as good as historical dramas get. The script has a contemporary feel that makes the dialogue relevant to many of the racial issues we face today. The filming alone makes the movie worth seeing, offering a delightful tour of grand palaces and glimpses of courtly life in 19th Century England. While the British have made many such films, it’s hard not to enjoy Victoria and Abdul.

Art cinema and genre film are often regarded as opposite ends of the movie spectrum. One flaunts filmmaking rules, the other depends on them. When they are blended, the result can be confusing, challenging, and very refreshing. The film Mother! (2017) is an example of a filmmaker deliberately provoking audiences with a multi-genre exploration that defies labelling. Calling this a horror drama does not even come close to describing the way it ramps up from a story of domestic abuse to home invasion, demonic possession, messianic madness, and then explodes into a supernatural fantasy of biblical proportions. Be prepared for a wild ride.

Talking of plot wrongly implies that the film’s narrative is based on logical progression whereas it feels more like a never-ending nightmare. It’s held together by imagination not logic. We meet an unnamed couple in a sprawling isolated country mansion: Mother (Jennifer Lawrence) is a young home decorator, and Him (Xavier Bardem) a famous poet whose writing has, like their sex life, dried up. One evening, two people arrive unexpectedly: Man (Ed Harris) is followed later by Woman (Michelle Pfeiffer) and soon the couple are making themselves at home, much to Mother’s discomfort. More people arrive and violence erupts among the strangers. The house is cleared, the sex life and poetry resumes, and fame returns. People line up to hear Him speak and the crowds keep getting bigger. Mother becomes a captive in her own house as her tummy swells with new life while the crowds spill into every room. They revere the ground on which Him walks, hang off Him’s every word, and souvenir anything they can carry while she is in fixated panic at the disintegration of her world. The crowd’s adoration turns to greed, then carnage, while Mother gives birth in a full-scale war zone compressed into a house. The new life is shared among the hordes as the apocalypse descends. It’s totally crazy.

The originality, absurdism, and audacity of this film are breathtaking. It makes more sense if viewed as a montage of interconnected visual metaphors, loosely assembled according to taste. There are clues that help decode its possibilities. For example, being nameless renders the cast into avatars for universal stereotypes, so the film is not just about a house full of people. History is littered with belief systems and their damage to humanity, while the birth in this film is Mothers’ single unifying power that is ripped from her arms in an horrific Biblical allusion to the ‘feeding of the masses’. The score is virtually non-existent, allowing natural sounds free reign to create a mood of Gothic claustrophobia. The camerawork pulsates with handheld rhythms and variable depth of field that isolate different planes of psychological and physical reality. The frequent camera close-ups on Mother’s face or over her shoulder foregrounds her viewpoint which makes this a feminist experience of a ‘man’s world’. The casting is perfect. Jennifer Lawrence’s youthful Madonna face becomes a powerhouse of depicted terror while Xavier Bardem’s turns into a stencilled visage of divinity, a self-absorbed messiah.

Whatever else it may be, this film is also a masterpiece of political and religious satire. Completely unbounded, it can be taken as a weird horror film or read as a meditation on gendered existentialism or an absurdist parody on the saviours that arise in every society throughout history. It is also completely here and now: when Him survives the dystopian chaos that he has created, ask yourself: who does he remind you of?

In an era of hot-housing, fast-tracking, and helicopter parenting, ideas like ‘let kids be kids’ seem positively retro. In its own low-key way, Gifted (2017) is batting for the rights of children to have a childhood, disguising its message in a heart-warming family drama with stellar acting and a child star who is impossibly adorable.

Former philosophy professor Frank Adler (Chris Evans) gave up his career to care for his seven-year old niece Mary (McKenna Grace) after her maths genius mother committed suicide. He repairs boats while neighbour Roberta (Octavia Spencer) looks after Mary and they all get on just fine until Mary starts schooling. She is a child prodigy who can already handle college-level math and is quickly bored at school. Frank is advised to enrol her in a school for gifted children but he just wants her to have a normal life. Enter the wicked grandmother Evelyn (Lindsay Duncan) who threatens a custody order if he does not raise her as a gifted child. Evelyn is also mathematically gifted and there is big prizemoney in solving the problem that her daughter took to the grave. Mary becomes a pawn in a battle that pits greed and parenting claims against Mary’s rights to have a normal childhood.

This story uses every narrative cliché in the book as well as standard formulas for saccharine cuteness, yet McKenna Grace can still charm audiences no matter how stereotyped and predictable the story. Delightfully precocious, she is an island of innocence and quick wit surrounded by a messy swirl of squabbling grownups. In case Mary cannot reach all the heartstrings by herself, there is a one-eyed cat named Fred who is threatened with extinction in the film’s only moments of excitement. Chris Evans does a more than passable job as the reluctant uncle who becomes the kind of dad any kid would want, and the scenes where he must leave Mary in foster care are a callous manipulation of audience tear-ducts. Of course, embers of obligatory romance with one of Mary’s teachers smoulder in the background and fortunately stays there other than when needed for touches of romantic comedy.

This is a well-paced story free of distracting sub-plots and supported by a high calibre ensemble. In an era of political correctness about non-traditional families it is refreshing to see a non-biological dad elevated as parent-hero. But if truth be told, it’s all about the kid. McKenna is a gifted child actress who steals every scene. The film’s message about the rights of children to be children will most likely get lost in the clutter of grown-ups needing to grow up. But that matters little because this is not a film for over-thinkers. It is light entertainment that is impossible not to enjoy.

The Dinner (2017) sounds like an enticing promise of a civilised occasion with fine food and polite conversation. But only a small part of that promise is met. The rest turns into a fiercely fought morality battle laced with class and racial issues that puts the audience squarely in the frame by asking: if you were one of these parents, what would you do?

Ambitious politician Stan Lohman (Richard Gere) is a powerful figure accustomed to being fawned over and getting his own way. When he and his partner Kate (Rebecca Hall) arrange dinner at an obscenely expensive nouveau cuisine restaurant you know it’s not about food. He rarely sees his brother, ex- professor of history Paul (Steve Coogan), and his wife Claire (Laura Linney) because Paul loathes Stan for what he represents politically. The elegant meal is a ritual of florid gastronomy that provides the only stable point of reference throughout a fractious evening full of sibling rivalry. The brothers have complex emotional baggage that they throw at each other in between the constant interruptions for Stan’s election campaign calls and Paul’s neurotic meltdowns. The story’s multiple flashbacks are intended to provide the backstory to this human mess but they also add layers of fractured disconnection leaving the film vulnerable to collapsing under its own weight. It is not until late in the meal that we learn what this dinner is about: a family summit to discuss a heinous crime committed by their teenage sons.

Audience reactions to this film will be polarised. Its disjointed flashback structure is unsettling and emotional spikes every few minutes. It’s a chaotic scene: the four diners can barely exchange a few words before someone gets up and leaves. The non-stop vitriol can feel like being trapped inside an elevator with four people who never stop shouting at each other. And just when you start to wonder why you are still watching, the shocking reason for the dinner tumbles out with a crash. Once the moral drama is in focus, the wait suddenly becomes worthwhile. A senseless crime by juvenile offspring places the parents in the role of judge and jury, and whatever they decide, the effects will last a lifetime. The filming is sumptuous, the performances by the stellar ensemble are superb, and the pace of dialogue is delivered with forensic precision. The action does not stray far from that table so the strength of this film lies entirely in the script and the acting, and it delivers in spades.

At two hours running time, this film feels like it could have been tightened. The arguments can be repetitive, the big reveal comes late, moral issues are left underdeveloped, and the finale interruptus will leave many viewers feeling cheated. But it’s a gripping thriller that will generate discussion and challenge you to examine your own views about the moral boundaries of parental responsibility.

It has been twelve years since the milestone Brokeback Mountain (2005)demanded that cinema be more honest in depicting the realities of same-sex love. Much has changed since then but most tropes of romance are still linked to heterosexuality. Whatever Brokeback achieved in the Wyoming mountains, God’s Own Country (2017) takes to another level in the Pennine Hills of Northern England. It is a measure of social progress that cinema has moved beyond just portraits of ‘forbidden love’ to a space where it can openly explore rather than confront gay love.

Life on a sheep farm is tough and lonely for Johnny (Josh O’Connor). Since his father’s stroke, he runs the farm by himself but all he gets is scowling disapproval from his ageing parents. He vents his anger and frustration in drunken binges and rough furtive sex with other gay men in a village wary of anyone who is different. A handsome Romanian seasonal worker Gheorghe (Alec Secareanu) is hired to help during the lambing season and Johnny’s rural racism erupts in verbal taunts. Called a gypsy once too often, Gheorghe confronts him with intense physicality and the relationship changes instantly. While tending the sheep, they spend a few nights in an isolated shelter and their first sexual encounter terrifies and confuses Johnny who has never known tenderness and emotional acceptance. Gheorghe’s sensitivity compels Johnny to confront his inner fears and discover his emotional self.

This is a complex film on several levels. The story barely moves forward in this cold, lonely, inhospitable place, with the narrative energy coming entirely from its earthy filming style and intense, authentic characterisation. The camera accentuates the slow pace of life by lingering on empty spaces, small details, and nature’s ways. A close-up of a butterfly, misty morning light, the birth of a lamb, panoramas of harsh beauty in frosty air, all take on meanings beyond what we see. The depth and nuance of acting by O’Connor and Secareanu is the film’s powerhouse. The silences are long and dialogue sparse, and much is communicated through action. Initially there is little to like about Johnny: we cannot get close to someone who is so distant from himself. Gheorghe is the opposite: intuitive, warm, and empathetic. The chemistry between them progresses from turbulence to deep acceptance and each step of the journey is raw and exposed. Intimacy between males is still a frontier in cinema and this film breaks through.

Like Brokeback, this is a genre-defying, coming of age, drama-rich love story. Today’s audiences expect realism in human relationship stories and this film offers a full-frontal exploration of masculine sexuality and emotional self-discovery. This is a love story of universal relevance that transcends the usual clichés of romance. It is brave cinema with cutting-edge honesty.

There is a narrow space between intelligent racial satire and mocking humour. Of course, you never get just one or the other in the same film: it’s always a mix, but the balance is critical and contentious. The Big Sick (2017) is an example of a film that nails the balance with clever dialogue that is genuinely funny and culturally insightful. An example of a film where the balance is less assured is the Australian-made Ali’s Wedding (2017).

Filmed in multicultural Melbourne, it is a story based on real people, real events, and loads of racial stereotypes. Many of its gag-lines depend on audiences noticing the difference between Lebanese, Egyptian, Iraqi and Iranian Muslims. The son of a popular Iraqi Muslim cleric, Ali (Osama Sami) carries the high expectations of his family who want only that he becomes a doctor and marries a Muslim girl of their choice. Ali is a mediocre student and fakes his medical entrance results to make his family and the community proud of him. He falls for a Lebanese girl called Dianne (Helana Sawires) but dares not tell his family as she is the ‘wrong type’ of Muslim. Meanwhile he is duped into an arranged engagement to the ‘right type’ of girl. He sneaks into medical classes to be near Dianne but the intricate web of lies that he has built begins to unravel and his life is a mess.

The highlight of this film is the comedic tension caused by Ali’s lies. We know that the web must collapse, but we just don’t know how or when. There are gags aplenty aimed both at Muslims and at those who laugh at Muslims. The cinematography has a low key, low budget feel that works well with this kind of situational comedy. There are enough sub-plots to give the ‘big lie’ texture, with a script designed for those who like to laugh at others expense. Osama Sami plays Ali with monotone authenticity while the shining starlight in this film is Helana Sawires. She brightens the screen with intelligent insights into what it’s like to be a smart repressed Muslim girl and she easily steals every scene in which she appears.

Cross-cultural gags can be funny but when the cinematic lens is widened one asks what are we really laughing at? Comedy is situational, character or script driven, and the situation that Ali has constructed has loads of comedic potential. But the script and characters struggle. For example, the satirical value in staging ‘Saddam The Musical’ is sabotaged by its amateurish presentation and seriously unfunny theatrics. The cultural differences between various Muslim ethnic groups are trivialised, like in Ali’s tea drinking ritual, and the exaggerated responses to the Iman’s words of teaching are mocking rather than respectful. In a global climate of Muslim-phobia, the gags in this film at times feel uncomfortably like laughing at people just because they are different.

It is unlucky timing that Ali’s Wedding is released so close to The Big Sick as comparisons are inevitable and for some, they will be unkind. Ali’s Wedding will be seen by many as a well-intentioned light-hearted rom com, and so it is. But it treads in the same space as other Aussie inter-racial films and it could have done more with the opportunity.

The comedy of manners genre uses satire to expose the rituals and affectations that pass for social politeness. Driven by witty dialogue and characterisation, it laughs at the best and worst in human behaviour. A good example is the comedy drama Madame (2017) that blends themes of race and class in a charming Cinderella tale of self-discovery.

The plotline is deceptively straightforward. Pretentious American couple Anne (Toni Collette) and Bob (Harvey Keitel) have rented an elegant manor in trendy Paris to impress their friends and clients. On the eve of a ‘spare-no-expense’ formal dinner a guest cancels, leaving the dinner table with an odd number of guests. Anne instructs her shy servant Maria (Rossy de Palma) to make up the number, pretend to be a Spanish lady friend, and say very little. After a few drinks, Maria becomes outgoing and is noticed by British art broker David (Michael Smiley) who is convinced she is a mysterious aristocrat. To Anne’s horror they begin seeing each other despite desperate attempts to stop them.

Woven into this simple plot is a portrait of a lowly maid hoping to be loved for who she is, not what she does. Her nemesis is Anne, the wicked witch who wants to keep her in place. While Keitel and Smiley competently fill their supporting roles, the emotional energy comes entirely from the two female stars. Collette portrays scandalised with consummate bitchery as she engineers what she calls a ‘slow-motion car crash’ and de Palma does a heart-warming rendition of the maid who dares to hope. Brilliantly filmed in Parisian locations, its narrative twists and turns play on themes of class ritual and racial stereotype. The script is at times laboured with trite references to knowing one’s place, but it is de Palma who keeps the story alive. She uses those big innocent eyes to convey how it feels to suddenly believe that someone really loves you, all while being oblivious to the masquerade into which she has been thrust. De Palma’s unconventional aesthetics become a device to highlight the deeper values of kind-hearted character and the superficiality of skin-deep beauty.

This slow-burning comedy is a study of inflated egos and natural humility. Its minimal plot allows the focus to stay on the battle between primal feminine drives, one stopping at nothing to preserve the social order, the other swept up in a Cinderella dream. Not all fairy tales have conclusive endings and nor does this one. But it has enough laughter and warm-hearted moments to be worth watching despite its BYO ending.

Deceptive titles might improve box office but they do little for a film’s integrity. The Lost City of Z (2017) will no doubt attract audiences with the prospect of a lost antiquity but that is not what this film is about. It’s a true story based on an ego-driven British explorer who is obsessed with finding an ancient civilisation so he can restore honour to his family name.

Set in 1905, the storyline covers an epic quarter of a century in several bold leaps of time and place. Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) struggles for advancement as a British officer because his gambling and boozing father brought disgrace to the family name. When given an opportunity to map the Amazon rainforest Percy leaves his pregnant wife Nina (Sienna Miller), knowing it might take years, all for the hope of personal glory. During the expedition, he learns of a lost ancient city full of untold riches but is forced to return to England before he can investigate. While British scientists scoff at the notion of a lost civilisation he is soon back in the Amazon, this time to find the lost city he calls ‘Z’. Forced again to abandon the expedition, the cycle is repeated many years later when he sets off for the Amazon with his now young adult son.

Despite having high production values, this film is an interesting example of thematic incoherence. Put simply: it does not know what it wants to be. It mixes an old-fashioned adventure tale with romantic melodrama, historical biography, thriller, period drama, with a World War I movie thrown in for good measure. The narrative arc is repetitive and the timeframe leaps are jarring. There are just so many times one can endure the sight of explorers encountering the same dangers and similar outcomes. The cinematography is magnificent but does not offset the trite dialogue and contrived skirmishes with Amazon natives and the British establishment. At times the dangers of exploring the Amazon appear as arduous as a weekend scouting camp except for the implausible moment when Percy stands tall under a shower of native spears shielded only by his journal. The colonial supremacy and the ‘all-men-are-equal’ themes are laboured to the point of lecturing, and the script at times falls through the floor, like when Nina farewells a son she may never see again with the words “have fun”. The main actors seem to play their stereotypes rather than express their roles with nuance and authenticity, and the relationship between Percy and Nina is meant to be foundational but conveys as plastic. While the film’s title promises excitement, the meandering story keeps disappointing so that by the end one doesn’t really care if the city existed or not.

Of course, British filmmakers are excellent in depicting the snobbishness of their society and this is a highlight of the film. The attempt to include moral discourse on British colonialism and feminism is tokenistic, but it does provide some insight into the ideas and attitudes that prevailed early last century. Some will find this uneven film engaging while others will welcome the credits when they arrive after what feels like an excessively long two hours and twenty minutes. At best, it is a solid tale made lacklustre in the telling.

War history films look beyond battle to examine how things came to be. A fine example is the Norwegian bio-pic The King’s Choice (2016). It tells the little-known story of the first three terrifying days when the Nazi war machine rolled into Norway and demanded that its ageing monarch surrender to the inevitable. Instead of the usual focus on military action, this war film is an extended essay on the moral responsibilities of leadership that is as relevant today as ever.

In April 1940, a fleet of German ships slips through Norwegian defences and issues an ultimatum: surrender or perish. Denmark had only recently capitulated to Germany but Norway’s King Haakon VII (Jesper Christiansen) had no intention of following its example. Norway’s traditional neutrality and antiquated military capacity made it seem defenceless, but it still managed to sink one warship which infuriated Hitler. A German envoy urged the King to accept a peaceful surrender and save Norwegian lives, but he refused to make it easy for the Nazis to take Norway. The Norwegian parliament was in disarray, nominally led by a Nazi-sympathiser with the surname Quisling, a word that universally has come to mean traitor. The nation was terrified and only the royal family was left as a symbol of hope and inspiration. Hitler was desperate to capture the family alive as a trophy for Nazi supremacy. The revered King and his heir apparent son fled to the countryside with Nazis in pursuit. Along the way, the envoy, his few remaining parliamentarians, and even his son, repeatedly urge the king to surrender. While Norway’s collapse was inevitable, the royal family escaped to London where they led the Norwegian resistance for the remainder of the war.

There are several reasons why this film deserves praise. The most obvious is that it illuminates a piece of history that most people, except Norwegians, know very little about. It is a measured, sombre study of leadership with a competent cast, excellent cinematography, and detailed period sets and costumes. It provides a finely wrought portrait of a nation facing catastrophe using minimal dramatic embellishment yet with tension that rises over its long running time (two and a quarter hours). Jesper Christiansen plays King Haakon with regal authenticity as he goes from being a grandfather figure playing with children to a giant of integrity in the face of an extraordinary moral dilemma. The king’s choice was his and his alone, and the film captures the enormous strain of knowing that Norway had no prospect of resisting the Nazi juggernaut yet believing that a nation’s dignity should never be surrendered.

Despite its epic qualities there are some minor quibbles. Foreign language translations inevitably struggle with nuance and keeping up with dialogue is made more difficult when white sub-titles appear against white backgrounds, The film’s pace would have benefited from more editing, less CGI and fewer scenes of the royal family in flight. But otherwise this is a gripping character-driven film that provides a fascinating glimpse into Norway’s war history.

Importing a Hollywood veteran into a quintessentially English romantic comedy can sometimes be magic, sometimes not. Hampstead (2017) might have been a great British romantic comedy but instead it must work with an inauthentic American personality who limits the film’s impact. Fortunately, brilliant cinematography rescues the film enough to produce a visually delicious but lightweight story of late-life romance between a lady and a tramp.

Based on a true story, Donald Horner (Brendan Gleeson) has been a squatter on London’s Hampstead Heath for 17 years. He is a surly off-the-grid loner who avoids all trappings of modern life in a quaint shanty shack built from other people’s rubbish. Within a binocular’s view from across the road, American widow Emily Walters (Diane Keaton) spies him bathing in the pond and out of curiosity soon invents an excuse to meet him. Property developers have targeted the land, and Donald must defend himself from an eviction notice. He becomes a cause celebre with do-gooders and naysayers petitioning for and against his squatter’s rights while he and Emily get together despite pushback from her posh Pommy friends. This predictable narrative of tramp versus society offers modest delights but few surprises.

There are three noteworthy parts to this uneven film: the cinematography and the two co-stars. The first is simply wonderful: Hampstead village and the Heath are lovingly filmed and the charming shanty shack looks like something out of a fairy tale. Every time Donald or Emily walk down the narrow track into the woods it becomes an act of escapism from urban living and entry into a floral wonderland. Brendan Gleeson is cast to perfection as a girthsome giant with craggy features and expressive eyes. His Irish accent complements the natural beauty of the Heath to which he convincingly belongs. And then there is Diane Keaton. What made her famous forty years ago in Woody Allen films do not translate easily to this contemporary British rom-com. The camera has tried too hard and its efforts are just too obvious: repeat use of backlit shots, glowing soft-focus, cutesy beret hat and Annie Hall smiles make it hard to engage with her character as a real person. In contrast to Donald’s melodic Irish-ness, Emily’s timing and tone are often grating. For example, when Donald’s home of 17 years is cruelly trashed in a turning point moment, Emily’s breezy response might work in New York but here is totally disengaged from what has just happened.

Donald’s story is based on a real character and a real fight between a homeless eccentric and the imperatives of capitalism so there is a serious side to Hampstead. But this lightweight rom-com is unlikely to raise consciousness of what is means to be homeless. The lukewarm chemistry between the senior lovebirds will excite few and the sleep-inducing musical score even less. Whether casting Keaton can add American baby boomer audiences to an essentially home-grown British story remains to be seen. Filmmakers sometimes need reminding that older viewers can handle more challenge than one-dimensional films like Paris Can Wait (2017)and Hampstead (2017).